Engineering Display Hack Day

October 17, 2013

What do we do when we have eight large TVs in the office driven by Mac Minis and a need to put our finger on the pulse of the business? We hold a hack day for the displays!

We allocated a Friday to seeing what interesting visualizations and summaries we could put up on the screens—including the display framework itself. Engineers, product managers, designers, and even the founder collaborated on ideas and we quickly got to work on ideas. The rules were simple: it had to inform us about our business, it had to be visual, and it had to have that “wow” factor.

We leveraged our SOA to report realtime data, and visualized it with WebGL, D3, and CSS3. Each hack project meant to tell a story of how the market was performing, the kind of clients we are getting, and the health of our accounts.

Monday morning the entire company gathered to view the efforts of the six teams, each group giving a demo of their technologies. Visualizations employed the use of 3D graphing, time-based charts, Leap Motion hand gesture controls, and WebSockets for realtime message notification.