DeepSource Hack 'n Camp '21
Our team has 30 folks living in cities across India, and company retreats help us make sure we get everyone under one roof at least once a year.
To make things more fun, we came up with 'Hack-n-camp.' The first half of our week was spent on the hackathon, and the second was spent in the Maldives to take a step back, reconnect, and recharge.
The Hack
We organize internal hackathons every few months. It's a fun way to get together with the team through sharing ideas and working on long-lasting innovative projects. We consider hosting these integral to our culture as they help us work on fun projects together and put everything we've learned in recent months to action.
This edition, we had five teams. Here's what they built!
Team Objective Oriented: DeepSource false-positives dashboard
Currently, at DeepSource, when users sometimes find a wrong issue has been raised, they report it, and we respond via e-mail. Tushar, James, and Parth teamed up to address this by building a false positives dashboard for DeepSource. As a comment thread, the idea was to have this dashboard integrated into our website.
Team InJuly: Fantasy console
Srijan, who recently joined our team, had been messing around with TIC-80 (a fantasy computer for making, playing, and sharing tiny games) at the time. Naturally, he decided to give it a go himself for our hackathon. He built a small virtual toy computer with a custom processor, its own instruction set, a 120 x 80 px display with MMIO, and a 4MB RAM. The console is written in Lua on top of the LOVE game framework. The computer takes in a ROM (a program written in a custom variant of assembly) and runs it on the virtual processor.
Team Pear: Autocomplete in Terminal
Vishesh, Raghav and Akshay teamed up to build 'Pear' as an alternative to fig.io (brownie points if you get the reference) as device management software blocks can be annoying — they log keyboard strokes, are not cross-platform. The trio wanted to build something way more simplified.
In true Sourcerer spirit, their project is public. You can check it out here: https://github.com/akshay-deepsource/pear.
Team Sourcery: Semantic search engine
Tausif and Vaibhav built a semantic search engine for DeepSource documentation using OpenAI's API. This engine allows users to search for the required document using terms that may not even be present in the papers. It does this by understanding the context of the term. The result is a list of links that lead to the desired documents.
Many users surfing through documentation face this issue, which inspired the idea of building a search functionality that understands the user's intent.
Team MostlyHarmless: DeepSource People
DeepSource people is the front page for the team who makes it all happen. Through 'People', Shivam, Hricha, and Aniruddh wanted to make a personalized team page to talk about the team members, their stories, hobbies, and quirks.
This is supposed to be a public page, where the community can peek inside the DeepSource culture and know more about the folks they are interacting with, things like how to pronounce their name, where they are from, their interests, and more.
We got on a zoom call to demo each entry and put it to an anonymous vote. Vaibhav and Tausif (Team 4) scored the highest, and each won a PS5 for their work. 🥳 Vaibhav's looking forward to playing lots of Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon Souls in the coming few weeks.
And that's how we wrapped up our hackathon! Overall, it was great fun and set the tone for phase 2 — The Camp.
The Camp
This year, our team has grown very fast and kept very busy. With this trip to the Maldives, we wanted to make sure we get to meet in person and get to know each other better beyond work. 🏕️
This retreat was an excellent way for us to do that. It was super effective in bringing our team together, coming up with new ideas, and aligning us on how our daily work fits the bigger picture. To top it all off - we had a lot of fun! All four days were spent sunbathing, snorkeling, jet-skiing, kayaking, swimming, and more.
At DeepSource, everyone is passionate about what we're building. But sometimes, to appreciate the mission, you need to take a step back and reconnect with the people you're taking the journey with. This trip helped us get to know each other better and spend time with teammates we've only before seen on a screen.
Heading back home to India, not only did our faith in the mission increase but it is also supported by a deeper bond among us.
PS: We're hiring! Check out our careers page if you'd like to know more about our team, and join in on all the fun.
