Innovation @ S7 Software
This was the title of the presentation that took place in our office a short while back. I wanted to write this last Thursday itself (when the presentation actually took place). But unfortunately didn’t get time. So writing this on a relaxed Sunday morning :-)
This is a presentation where people showcase their FFF creations. If you are wondering what FFF is, it is expanded as “Feel Free Fridays” where people can work on their own pet projects. Here are the projects that were presented:
Lisa:
This is a build analysis framework. Lot of times we stumble upon customers who don’t have their source code well organized. All sources might not be maintained under one directory structure. In such cases transferring their source code completely to S7 to do porting will be painful task. I remember projects which took 1.5 months just to get all sources. Infact I’m facing this problem right now in my own project :-)
Solution to this was first proposed by Kumar. He proposed a runtime build analyzer. The project was named Lisa. This way, first need to run the build on client’s machine through Lisa’s interface. As the build happens Lisa will capture all files that are being used in the build and the dependencies between them. The dependency will be displayed as a directed acyclic graph and all files used in the build will be tarred and zipped as a gzip file to be transferred to S7. This will enhance productivity by reducing the time taken to replicate client’s build environment at our end.
Unfortunately the interns who carried out this project were not present during the presentation (due to their exams) and I took the pleasure of presenting it. The sales team was impressed and asked for a windows version of the same and few feature enhancements too!
Enigma:
This is my own pet project :-) It was designed by Karthik and me. Enigma is an Online Programming Contest framework. This will give us the ability to host our own programming contests similar to Topcoder.
Contests happen at a fixed time and for a fixed duration. Various algorithm intensive questions will be posted and contestants can solve the problem in one of the following languages - C, C++, Java or Dot Net. (Few python enthusiasts were asking for python support. Let’s see…) Once the contestant has solved the problem, he/she can submit it through the web interface. The solution will be compiled and checked for correctness automatically and scores/rank will be updated. Security concerns are yet to be addressed however. Somebody asked a smart question - “What if someone intentionally codes a malicious program and submits it?” Without missing a beat, or looking up for the questioner, Manju replied “We’ll hire him!” :-)
Unfortunately we presented only one third of we work we did. One part we didn’t present is a similar system for people who come in to take interviews. This process needs to be computerized. One important difference here from the previous problem is, our question papers have some puzzles which cannot be automatically evaluated by machine. So, when a candidate completes answering a paper the paper will automatically be mailed to the person (decided by the HR while setting the interview) who will correct it and send it back. All tests will be achieved for future reference. One more part that was not presented is the infinite timed contests like SPOJ which will be used internally.
Karthik made the presentation and it was quite witty! There were laughs and giggles here and there :-)
ImageGallery:
This is an online photo organizer designed and presented by Tripati. The idea came when Sridevi (HR) was using picassa for hosting some of our photos online. So the question was raised - Why use Picasa for putting up S7 related photos? Why not host it on our own. Why not build our own Photo Gallery like software?
But this is something to be debated. The debate arose after the presentation. One group was arguing “Why reinvent the wheel? Why build something that already exists? Why not use some open source solution?” Another group argued “It is always a pleasure to use our own product that something designed by somebody else. This way we’ll have more control on the software”. This is an argument that surfaces very frequently at S7. I remember this kind of argument surfacing when in one of our previous presentation one team presented ‘cyborg’ – an IM tools which will let you speak to machines!
The product looked very simple and clean which I liked. I also heard Tripati developed it in a very short time. Great work!
AdminTools:
Unfortunately I wasn’t there when this project was presented. For the mails I understand it is a web-based tool for automatically tracking/querying the various hardware resources that is available at S7. This uses snmp to retrieve details of all hardware available at office that is connected to network and stores it in a central repository. This repository can later be queried using the given web interface. For example I can ask “Give me a Linux machine that has more than 2 GB of RAM and has MySQL installed.”
Though I was not present during the presentation of this project, guessing by the presentation time it took and the number of questions it evoked, it must have been a great work!
Great going ‘innovation @ S7’ !
