KNP First Hackathon

The very first KNP Hackathon took place at the end of last week in an wonderful 18th century hunting castle in the Normandy landscape. The menu for the KNP Hackaton was: 3 days of coding, learning, sharing and... drinking of course :) Let me tell you that every part of it was a success.

The starter: a fantastic atmosphere

After a first try last year, this KNP Hackathon had the goal to reunite all KNPeers from every locations: Nantes, Paris, Germany, Ukraine, Serbia and Switzerland. All our newcomers felt at home very quickly helped by the pool tables, the archery, and Docteur Klein's jokes. The wonderful place with the amazing food provided us the perfect means to just do what we like the most: code and just enjoy the rest of the day! Insider note: We even had to force people to have breaks to go eating... Just have a look at the place and the diner table and you'll understand :)

The main course: code & discover

The idea was quite simple: ask 3 teams to work on the same (toy) project to discover new techs, learn new stuff and share new tips. While going out of our technical comfort zone. 3 teams were created: The KISS, The Couscous and the Snowballs - please don't ask why. A project was chosen: a (fake) SaaS for generating PDF. After 3 days of coding the results were upon expectations: we got 3 totally different projects, with very different technologies!

The KISS - Andrew, Flo and Jérémy

"We did not go with a typical Symfony application. We provide a SDK which replaces Snappy: We went full SOA since the beginning, that means that we use one docker container for one service. This is pure Software as a Service, because the software can be integrated with multiple different clients. We did not focus on the web UI at first : The first day we only wrote 7 lines of code that could only be usable via command line. And then we started making more sexy UIs like the browser extension "KISS my ass", for "Keep it simple stupid, managed by yourself, a simple & superb", and the angular front-end. We coded with three or four different languages: Python, Php, bash, JS. Gearman and Redis was total new for us and it was cool to use! We did not focus at all as an end user or human usable product, but as a replacement for snappy, which means programmatic PDF creation."

The Couscous - Pierre, Laurent, Olivier and Gaultier

"We are having a ball with Snappy. Snappy is really just a pretext to try out plenty of nice technologies. We have implemented an online payment with Stripe. We used Sidekiq, and a custom Ruby PHP bridge, for the asynchronous PDF generation. We used JWT (JSON Web Token) so that the components and the API can discuss. Like the KISS team, we used Fig to automate the Docker container management, with one container for the application. Pierre tried an original way to use Symfony: without MVC or routing, only Events Listeners. We learned a lot about Docker, and also how to install it on Mac (it was a pain in the ass, to be honest, even with boot2docker). But once the Docker setup is done, it is very handy, and it's a real pleasure to use it. We also played with Redis, for storage and for inter-processes and inter-containers communication. We also gave a try to MongoDB for the 'SASS quota management', with Doctrine ODM."

The Snowballs - Pilot, Saša, Yann, Gianni, David, Sylvain and Oleg

"We used only one language to realize the Snappy SaaS project: good old plain JavaScript and CSS. The main idea of our project is to create a sexy front-end application without using any framework to avoid being vendor-locked. We wanted a system as distributed as possible. So that every single piece can be scalable horizontally, with separation of the front and the backend. We are using front-end technologies like pure simple JS, Yeoman to bootstrap an application, gulp to manage tasks. And as backend-technologies we used nodeJS to create the REST API. We learned also how to use Redis. We really do clean JS stuff. For some of us, this was first time to work with Node.js. It was a good opportunity to get started with new technology fast, and discover new tools with less pain. It was also both fun and challenging to work in a big team!" It was just amazing to see those really different results and hear every devs tell us the group what they have learnt during those 3 days.

The dessert: Amazing Happy People

I founded KNP 6 years ago with a clear vision: creating a company of Happy Awesome Developers, with Symfony2 as a means to an end. A work place where people are both happy and productive. This sounds quite easy when you think about it - well it is not!

It took us years to find ourselves, to tune our ways to create a Happy place while working on projects (which are by nature always imperfect). It took us years to hire the right people while still managing to take care of them in the long run. It took us years to try relentlessly different strategies, processes, methodologies to involve everyone while still moving forward, to adapt while still keeping our foundations.

It took us years to resist the call from a quick easy growth and rather take the time to build steadily. And we've still got a very loooooong way to go too. But during this HacKathon, as I was looking at the 17 other KNPeers who were laughing, coding, sharing, discussing in a mixture of French and English, happy to be here, eager to take on new challenges and feeling at least as much "KNP" as I do, I must confess: I felt really proud to be a part of it.

So I just want to say one thing: THANK YOU TEAM, you really are Happy Awesome Developers!

Laetitia.

PS: If you want to join us for the next Hackathon: We are hiring in Paris!