It’s been a while, eh? Figured I’d make a quick post about some of the things I’ve been up to lately.
Hackday
I won CareerBuilder’s Hackday competition back in August. The gist of Hackday is that you come up with an idea, research it, flesh it out, and then present it. If your idea is one of the top picks, then you win $10,000 and 6 weeks (paid work time) to implement it. I worked with 2 other people on an idea to ensure that job searches on our site always return some results (because anything is better than nothing). The idea won, we executed it, and it’s still live on the site now.
Rich Web Experience 2012
I went to the RWX 2012 conference in Florida. Very nicely executed conference. Plenty of sessions to pick from, though I felt like I made some bad picks a few times. Still, I learned a lot. I found myself particularly excited about MongoDB, which I didn’t know much about before. Can’t wait to spin up a project to try it out.
Other than that, the location was really nice. Right on the beach with plenty of restaurants and bars within walking distance. Good times.
Chrome Extension
I took on a fairly big side project to write my first Chrome extension: a tool for developers at CareerBuilder that lets us see logging, stats, and debug info for our web pages as they run. I can’t share it because, as you could imagine, it contains a lot of sensitive information about our environment. But hopefully I’ll get around to writing an in-depth blog post about it soon. The results were great, and even though it took much longer than expected (months), I really enjoyed making it.
CareerBuilder Hackathon
CareerBuilder had its first official Hackathon last week. We were given 24 hours, from noon to noon, to make whatever we wanted. We were given the time, office space, food and drink, and permission to work on anything without having to validate it to the business. It was awesome to just take an idea and run with it. And the general environment was a lot of fun. Definitely something I hope becomes tradition.