Innovation Day Winners – Meteor, TYPO3 and Zurb Foundation
Earlier this month, Web Essentials launched our first ever Innovation Day – a day for our employees to activate their creativity to work on anything they’ve wanted to that relates to our business. The 24-hours time span was an opportunity for developers to experiment with new technologies, admin staff to explore new and better ways to work and our designers to conjure up a new marketing strategy.
By the end of the day, votes were cast where teams were ranked by their product’s usefulness, reusable components, maintainability, flair and overall completion.
The results are in! Here’s what our top 3 teams created:
Bronze - Responsive Website using Zurb Foundation
Coming in at third place, Man took on the task of creating a new template for our company’s website. By subscribing to TYPO3's mailing list, Man discovered Foundation, a responsive front-end framework that focuses firstly on creating web-apps on small devices. Using Foundation, Man was able to implement a flexible grid to our website, allowing it to be viewed on any screen size. The open-source framework uses JavaScript and CSS, and with a few simple modifications, the website became responsive. The off-canvas menu option was also utilized to move the menu layout to the side of the interface.
Silver - Responsive Boxmodel template using Twitter Bootstrap and TYPO3
A two-man, one lady team (Sengchheng, Chivy and Sovandy respectively) updated our current Standard TYPO3 Configuration for creating websites using Twitter Bootstrap and the latest version of TYPO3. Each extension was updated allowing the template to be scalable and adaptable to different environments.
An off-canvas layout was also implemented to improve the navigation. By allowing the menu to be displayed off the main screen and accessible by a swift left swipe it promises a cleaner appearance of web apps on smaller devices.
Gold - ATM Finder
Our winner Sophy, used Meteor, an open-source platform for building web apps. He created a tool for users to find their bank’s ATMs in Phnom Penh. By storing the ATM information in MongoDB (a NoSQL database) and just a few adjustments to the JavaScript in Meteor, he was able to quickly create this simple, yet highly valuable app. Benefits of using Meteor was how the same APIs were available on the client and the server, and how the template automatically updated when changes were made to the database. Definitely a time saving app!
For tutorials on Meteor, check out:
Overall, it was great to see our staff delve deep into their projects and to explore what’s available out there.
Will there be Innovation Day 2013 - #2?
You can bet on it! The sharing of knowledge and ideas, room for creative thinking and experimentation, and freedom to work at their own pace are just a few positive feedbacks we received from our staff. It was a great team building exercise and we found an exciting way to motivate staff to think outside the square.
Want to host your own Innovation Day?
There are many resources available online. Check out Atlassian’s ShipIt Days and FedEx Days on Linkedin.
