Everybody loves Fridays, but the second Friday of every month is special at PagerDuty—that’s Hack Day. On Hack Day, anyone at PagerDuty can work on any project they like for the entire day, even non-technical staff. Whether it’s a tech demo, some kind of code cleanup, or odds and ends for a public GitHub repo, everyone is encouraged to participate. The following week, the hackers present their projects to the company and trophies are awarded for Most Awesome, Most Useful, and “No Codez” (non-programming) projects.
There’s good-spirited competition for the Hack Day awards, and some of the hackers put a lot of effort into their presentations. Some are so inspired, they even spend evening or weekend time to make it better (which technically is cheating, but at least they’re passionate!).
Everyone at PagerDuty loves seeing the projects, and April’s Hack Day did not disappoint. Here’s a look at the winners in the technical categories, plus an honorable mention.
Most Useful: Doug’s Colorized Prompts
One constant danger of coding is accidentally running commands on a production box that were intended for a test box. Doug Barth tackled the issue and defined command prompts that are customized based on the environment a programmer is coding in. There are three styles: Development, Staging, and Production. The styles are color-coded for each environment (green = development, yellow = staging, red = production), and a unique prefix is applied for programmers who don’t have color support in their terminal. For the root user, the prompt is underlined as an extra warning since they have access to break even more stuff. As a bonus, the title bar also shows the prefix so the programmer can easily spot the production tab he or she left open.
Having distinct prompts for each set of servers will help PagerDuty programmers keep their code straight and prevent a lot of headaches. Thanks, Doug, for a truly useful hack.
Most Awesome: Evan’s MiFi Battery Hack
At PagerDuty, we rely heavily on a fleet of MiFi portable Wifi hotspots to provide connectivity to our on-call engineers while they’re on the road. Unfortunately, the battery life on these devices is pretty terrible, which creates some rather untimely obstacles. Since most of the engineers sit right next to their MiFis while using them, Evan Gilman developed some code to reduce the signal length of the MiFi to increase the device’s battery life. The code modifies the transmit power of the wireless card inside the MiFi, reducing it by an arbitrary amount.
In his testing, Evan was able to achieve nearly twice the battery life, ensuring that a fully-charged MiFi will live past the 8-hour mark under constant moderate use. With this, we have hope that the days of searching for an outlet in the midst of a crisis are behind us.
The code isn’t suitable for public release yet, but Evan plans to package it into a gem once it gets polished a bit.
Runner-Up for Most Awesome: Ian’s Voting App
Ian Enders developed a web app that lets everyone at PagerDuty submit their categories for Hack Day and then place their votes. We used to vote on a white board, but this didn’t work very well with remote teams (we have a new office in Toronto). Yeah, it’s pretty meta.
The code is public and you can check it out at https://github.com/ienders/leethaxors. Have ideas to improve it? Fork it and let us see what you can do.
And that’s a wrap. We hoped you enjoyed seeing these projects and learning what we’re working on when we take a break from our regular work days. Stay tuned for more updates from future hack days.
It’s a busy integration-filled day at PagerDuty. We’re excited to announce an integration with 
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Joe, our new Director of Demand Generation, joins us from Atlassian, where he was responsible for the dark arts of demand generation. Joe is an expert in online advertising & SEO and has a PR background. Besides from being a marketing guru, Joe is an avid cyclist, enjoys yoga, and loves an amazing Italian meal.
Edgar has quickly established himself as a coding machine with rapid and well documented pull requests. Within a weeks time, Edgar won the nickname Machine Gun, though our office manager would like to call him the Cereal Bandit. No matter what time of day it is, you will find Edgar enjoying a bowl of cereal.
Arup claims that he was hired for his charming wit and dashing good looks, which isn’t that far from the truth. Arup brings years of experience growing teams and team members from Amazon and Netflix to expand and improve our Operations Team. Don’t let his title fool you, Arup is a well rounded software engineer that studied Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
All the way from Florida, Evan joins the Operations Team as a Senior Engineer. Evan impressed us during his onsite interview when he passed all of his interviews in 30 minutes or less! When Evan isn’t in the SF office, you can find him with a camera in an exotic part of the world.
If he’s not at a Toronto Blue Jay’s game or jamming away on the drums, you can find Mr. Duffield at the Toronto PagerDuty office. Ryan recently joined the Realtime team after working at his own startup for 2+ years. Though he works in the Tech industry, Ryan is an amateur astronomer.
The title for Happiest Dutonian in the SF office goes to Ranjib. Regardless of the situation, Ranjib always has a smile on his face. He joins the Operations Team after working at Google and ThoughtWorks.
Clay is the newsiest dutonian to join the Product team, after working at Thomson Reuters Business. Clay brings a passion for building tools, automating, and generally making front-end Javascript code work better. We say we hired Clay for his coding skills, but we really hired him for his award winning Texas chili recipe that has 6 different types of meat!!
