Hack Day 0002

by Casey Pugh on 06/19/14

We had another great hack day recently. Such hacks. To help get our creative juices flowing, we had three special guests stop by the office, all with amazingly successful Kickstarter projects. James George of CLOUDS, Alex Hague of Monikers, and John Yost of White Creek.

Here's the recap:

Michael and I built a page that allows publishers to easily customize their embeds.

Forest made an internal utility that allows us to have more flexibility when it comes to analyizing all our data

Steven added some magic to the tab of our video page that allows you to see at a glance if a video is playing.

Gina and Charlie massively upgraded our video player to support thumbnail scrubbing.

Sagar and Chris built a more robust monitoring system using Librato so we have better and more immediate insights into our platform.

Alex stole the entire team's baby photos and framed them for the office. The Ultimate Hack.

Chad reenvisioned what a 10-foot, internal dashboard could look like. It allows us to at a glance to see how we're doing day to day.

Fueled by our inspiration of CLOUDS, James, Charlie, and I helped James George test the possibility of integrating CLOUDS directly with VHX. CLOUDS is basically an interactive movie with hours and hours of content. Because of its unique form, it faces a difficult distribution challenge. That said, by the end of the day, we had a working example of CLOUDS authorizing with the VHX API and dynamically pulling in videos on the fly. Crazy! CLOUDS is built with OpenFrameworks and James hopes to release an OpenFrameworks VHX addon to the ofxAddons community.

Hack day success.