Our inaugural Hog Camp - What pizza and books have in common
by Sarat Pediredla Under Hog Camp, NewsPeople who read our blog will know that our first ever Hog Camp concluded last Friday. Hog Camp is hedgehog lab's internal Hack Day that runs over 48 hours and gives us a chance to build, experiment and work with tools and ideas that we would normally not explore in our daily jobs.
The biggest difference in Hog Camp from traditional Hack Days is that everybody participating works towards 1 single idea/solution rather than each individual or small teams working on their own. Our hope was that this encourages team work and help people build on the type of skills that are required in large teams (which is something we usually don't get in a small company like ours).
As expected, it was an intense 2 days of coding, design, discussions and beer+pizza which ended up producing some awesome results. We even managed to get people from outside hedgehog lab interested in the event and we are now opening up our next event to a select list of guests.
Presenting hedgehog lib....
The project our team chose to tackle for the inaugural Hog Camp was a web-based library system that allows us to manage our ever-growing book list and allow a painless and easy way to track their movement.
Unlike most Hack Day projects, hedgehog lib has a very practical purpose; it is going to be used on a near daily-basis internally at hedgehog lab. The core idea behind hedgehog lib was to build something within 48 hours that would have the following functionality.
- Allow us to search for and add books to our library (using Google Book Search)
- Allow the ability for users to register and check out/check in books to help keep track of who is reading what.
- A wishlist feature for people to request books they would like in our library.
Although the final feature set includes a bit more than this, I am glad to report we managed to build and get to a first version of a usable product.
A sneak peek
Free as in free beer
Although hedgehog lib is a great first version, there is plenty of scope to improve the solution and customise it for various needs. To keep with the spirit of the event, we have decide to open source all our future Hog Camp projects in the hope that others will find them useful for their own use or developing the solution further. You can grab the source from our public Hog Camp mercurial repository.