Digital

Hackathon Day #2

This is a post by Jono Ellis, our Social Media Manager, and follows on from yesterday’s post about day 1 of our hackathon.

The byline of this blog post should probably read – “the day the webcam was named “Sauron’s Eye”.

Today marks the end of our hackathon and overall the mood is pretty jubilant! The team has had fun and developed 6 different and exciting ideas:

Automated testing on Android – this allows testers to view a user journey though the site as part of the testing process.
Rich nitro-boosted search – this gives us responsive search featuring maps, playable video, local authority phone numbers and deep links into sections within the site – all from search results. Edinburgh search results: Before
Edinburgh search results: After
404 page – adding intelligent content to the 404 page based on mistyped URLs, providing people with relevant alternatives.
OrientDB investigation – exploring the effect of using a graph database system for the site as an alternative to our relational database (Postgres) and document database (Mongo). This, unintentionally, surfaced some interesting data visualisation opportunities to improve our information architecture.
Testing using Nagios for infrastructure monitoring – overall feeling was that this wasn’t as intensive to set up as first thought and is an interesting alternative to our current setup.
Setting up an office timelapse – presenting an opportunity to use this to track progress of stories along the Kanban board… but for today it mostly captured the comings and goings of the office.