September 09, 2014 / by Kim Hogeling / Web developer / @kimhogeling
shopping24 Hacking Days Summer 2014
2 days in the last week of August gave room to explore some of the ideas and projects the shopping24 developers had. We do this on a regular schedule, last time in Spring 2014.
For hacking days, we encouraging the tech team members to challenge new technologies or technologies new to them. This time, among some internal others, these projects got chosen:
- “Setting up Hubot and loading it with tons of scripts”
- “Continuing of the image and shape recognition in Solr using LIRE”
- “Launching and provisioning a test environment at AWS with Jenkins”
Hubot
Hubot is a chat robot initially written by GitHub. He was created to entertain people as well as be helpful. Hubot is open source and written in CoffeeScript on Node.js.
Due to a communication problem our companies hubot was named “Huboldt”. The scripts we added to the existing functionality include an jenkins script which allows us to list all current Jenkins jobs as well as start builds from the chat.
If you want to learn more about hubot and see what he can do check out https://github.com/github/hubot/tree/master/docs.
Continuing of the image and shape recognition
During our last hacking days, we developed our first version of a tool which finds similiar pictures of a given product image. We devoted to this project again and implemented a service that analyses an uploaded picture and reveals images which are similar to it. We developed two client usecases as a proof of concept:
- A webapp where you can upload pictures (of a product) by a browser and the app will show you the most similar (above)
- Our own hacking-days android app to take a picture and find similar products (below)
Launching a test environment at AWS with Jenkins
We recently did a transition from Puppet to Ansible. After transforming the server provisioning to ansible, we moved AWS instance creation (and other administrative tasks) and WAR and PHP-Deployment to Ansible.
During the hacking days we took the chance to combine our existing Ansible playbooks and let Jenkins automagically create a AWS spot instance for testing, provision the server, build the web projects, deploy the applications and manage internal DNS names. It worked, we have happy testing!
Want to hack with us?
