Our company hack day came around again and the topic for this one was improving our social media presence. So we decided to take something “social” that we do internally and let the world hear about it: we hacked the Talis foosball table to count goals automatically and tweet the final scores. Here’s how…

At Talis we have a distributed team. We have people in multiple countries, in different timezones and supporting everyone is a problem we have to solve. We’re always looking for ways to improve how we go about communicating between the teams and ensuring everyone feels included.

Our latest Hackday focused on this - making it easier for remote workers to connect, not just with other remotees, but with their office-bound colleagues.

Now bear with me here, as this is a slight detour from our normal engineering-focused posts - this one is about a card game we made…

At last week’s Talis Hackday I worked on “powering up” Lord Zeus, our Hubot plug-in to Hipchat. Hubot can be great fun and amazingly useful. We added scripts that were both.

Not happy with a 48” monitor for your presentation? No problem - just share your desktop across a 3x3 bank of them, and the whole world can watch!

You’re lazy, you don’t want to walk all the way to the kitchen to find there’s no milk, right? Well, with this Talis hardware hack, you don’t have to…

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play. ~ John Cleese

Collaboration, it turns out, is not a gift from the gods but a skill that requires effort and practice and in recognition of this we’ve been trying to make sure that we give ourselves more time to creatively explore ideas as a team.

Stuck with working out how to optimize your DB? Maybe your Rails app isn’t scaling and you’d like some advice on what to do? Well never fear, because Never Lunch Solo is here.