Pusher inaugural hack day

Whilst we’ve attended many a hack day, and helped organise a few external ones, this was our first internal hack day. Why? Well, we’ve only just assembled a big enough team that allows us to justify having an official one. It was also a great opportunity for some of us to try out parts of Pusher that we’ve not used before and in doing so double-check the usability of our APIs and documentation.

The main point of the day was really to put ourselves in our customers shoes. We want to make sure that we are providing as much value as possible by making it easy to quickly build secure real-time applications using Pusher. We also got to have some fun writing code and building a few demos.

The demos included a simple web app that lets you collaboratively create music called Cacophony, a clone of the ESP game which can really benefit from real-time messaging, a multiplayer space game inspired by Escape Velocity and a real-time Twitter scoreboard to demonstrate social media integration and gamification. My personal favourite was Cacophony since it combines real-time collaboration with very simple visualisation. I’m really hoping that Mary and Martyn get a chance to do a little more on this.

The day helped us develop several ideas for how we can improve both the ease of access to our service and the documentation. We had already started reviewing our documentation so the results will be fed straight in. It also demonstrated how much fun it can be to build HTML5 Games so we’ll definitely be trying to make it easier for our users to do this.If you have any ideas or suggestion about how we can make Pusher better for you please let us know.