Hi Everyone.
We’re well and truly into our second Hack-a-thon for the year at Envato. A couple of times annually, staff are encouraged to form self-selected self-named and self organising teams, selecting a pet project to work on (and hopefully complete) for two weeks. We call it “Hack Fort” (two weeks is a “fortnight” in Australia) and many of its projects have gone on to become part of our live products. So I thought it might again be time to let you in on some of the things that our teams are racing on.
Depending on the team, there are projects that community members would notice and those you would not. Let’s start with the ones you would! In the next couple of days we’ll be launching:
- Sales by region data for authors from the Icon team
- Market status updates and Review queue waiting times by the Heartbeat team
- A new media player by Team Corporate Shark Enterprise
- Jingles. A trial service for buying and selling jingles by The Jingles
Look out for their posts in Envato Announcements!
There are also a few projects that you’ll see if you’re an open-source devotee. Envato engineers are always very keen to see their work form a developer community contribution. Hack Fort is a great time to be giving back in that way. Having others contribute to our work invariably makes it better too.
The Alien Autopsies are working at preparing our secure storage method (we call it “Area 51”) to one day become an open source project. The Stack Masters are sharing too. They’ll make open-source a gem we built for making AWS infrastructure setup easier. The Style Guides team (some teams opt for a less outlandish name!) are extending the newly open-sourced Guide Gem, adding our “single sign on” elements to its library.
Finally, here are some projects you might never know about, unless you read about it here!
Malgranda Mondo (Esperanto for “Small World” I’m told) are trying to make it possible to translate (and test) at least part of our site. It’s a short experiment, with great long-term potential if it works.
Harvey Birdman & The Legal Eagles are keen to give the Envato legal department greater autonomy in bringing you those important legal doc updates. Email to the People wants to make it easier to identify and contact specific groups of Market users, when only those people need to know.
Age of Empires is hard at work on Envato’s developer tooling. They’ll be providing our teams with a Heroku-like deployment tool, to bring their code to you easier and faster. For testing their features and making them available, our developers rely on a custom toolbar they built themselves. The Stealth Mountain team are giving that an revamp.
Hope you see something that gets you excited, or at least gets you thinking!
this when it launches.
