On this day, the focus is on learning, curiosity and fun. We also try new things with customers in our day-to-day business, but on Just-do-it-Day we can experiment with completely new things that do not serve any immediate productive purpose.
Here is a selection of the topics we covered on Just-do-it-Day.
Scrum Master method toolbox
In his work as a Scrum Master, Horand had collected a large collection of different methods for retrospectives. He wanted to categorize this collection, make it searchable and make it available to other Scrum Masters. To this end, he and a pairing partner designed a categorization system and sorted the methods not only into different categories, but also into the 5 phases of a retrospective. At the same time, Paul and I programmed an application that can record and filter the methods. Unfortunately, the application was not finished, but we will definitely continue to develop it.
Neos Fusion Playground
(Almost) all developers have used CodePen or a similar application to execute code quickly and easily, see the result and share it directly and easily. There is no such application for Neos and the Fusion language used in it - yet. One of the teams has developed an interface with which you can now execute your code snippets easily and instantly in the browser. We will publish this application in the next few days so that everyone can benefit from the results of our Just-do-it-Day.
An LED sensor light with Raspberry Pi
Even as a pure web development company, sometimes you want to understand what code in hardware feels like. Weiye got himself a Raspberry Pi for this purpose, along with the necessary sensors and a USB-powered light. As a team, we then plugged the motion sensor, the Raspberry Pi and the lamp together and added software that switches the lamp on when someone approaches the system. Combine this with the light sensor and we had a lamp that switches on in the dark when someone approaches. Okay, you might be thinking, I can buy that at the DIY store for €24.95 and even light up my front garden with it. But then you only have a lamp that lights up in the dark and you can use it. But you don't know "what holds the world together at its core".
Creating a Ceph test cluster on hardware in our data center
A sub-team from the technology department, led by Jörg, took servers that happened not to be in use at the time and installed a Ceph cluster on them. This is a file system that can store data distributed across several computers and has no single point of failure. At the end of the day, a cluster was running with appropriate monitoring. There just wasn't much to see - nobody had stored any files on it yet.
Creating your own widgets for the TYPO3 dashboard
Since TYPO3 v9, there has been a dashboard extension with which user-defined dashboards can be defined. Since we have rarely used these in our day-to-day business, Alex and his team have taken on the dashboard and created the most important dashboard widgets:
There is now a widget with which statistical graphs of TYPO3 data can be displayed. Of course, the widget that redirects directly to the punkt.de website with one click could not be missing either. But the most valuable widget was the "Chuck Norris Facts" widget, with which we can now load the most important facts about Chuck Norris directly from a corresponding website. Again, more than just a gimmick! Of course, you can also display data from other relevant websites from the Internet or intranet as a widget.
Conclusion
Personally, I think the Just-do-it-Day is great because it gives me the chance to try out new and old ideas that have always been in the famous drawer. This day gives me the opportunity to put these ideas into practice and to see whether the ideas can perhaps be more than just ideas in a drawer. I'm already looking forward to the next Just-do-it-Day in about six months' time.
