International Day of Women and Girls in Science
Integrating new technology into team building activities and team development is a thrilling way to engage employees in a safe and playful environment outside the standard working environment.
Our “Bitrock Front-end Brain Training Game”, a RxJs training session during which our Front-end team tried their hand at generating a data stream in an engaging virtual game, is just an example.
The event - Bitrock's first of its kind - was organized last Spring with two main goals: to experiment new front-end technologies applying them in a practical code project, and to improve teamwork among team members who are often assigned to different projects.
Let’s now consider at a closer glance the technical aspects of our Brain Training Game.
Our goal was to organize a training session on reactive programming. We thus implemented the Back-end and Front-end (in Javascript) of a small Brain Training game application, in order to have a generator of a fair number of events.
Although this was a small-size project, we made an initial analysis working with the UX team and producing some wireframes, mockups and flow diagrams.
The Front-end part was built with React, and we focused on the adoption of the reactive paradigm using RxJS. For the Back-end, we opted for MarbleJs, a framework with RxJs capability. WebSocket was adopted as an events communication system, and we created some components that subscribed to it.
Internal events like these have many side effects in terms of employee empowerment and corporate workplace culture.
To begin with, our Brain Training Game has proven to be a highly collaborative, team-building activity empowering team members. Collaboration and teamwork are forged by such occurrences: people are drawn together and motivated to achieve a common goal when they are presented with a common problem to solve.
The game has also given our company (and specifically the Front-end department) a great opportunity to innovate. This is due to the fact that the very essence of these activities encourages creativity, as each team member is involved and granted complete freedom to develop and express themselves. Having a set amount of time to complete the project produces results. However, this is a different kind of pressure than what employees are used to, and a game may help loosen the constraints of corporate bureaucracy, responsibilities, and strict deadlines.
Last but not least, the relaxed atmosphere of such an event, which is centered on a shared challenge expressed through an interactive online game, offers a temporary departure from the standard. And such a “disruptive” workflow can lead to an improved work ethic among employees.
Not to mention the chance to have fun and share pleasant moments with coworkers throughout the workday – if deadlines, reports, and briefings are part of the team's everyday routine, why not set aside some time and space for something different? A bit of fun is always appreciated.
Thanks to our Brain Training Game, Team members have had the chance to share their imagination, create cool things, and learn while having fun.
All participants have shown great excitement during the event: for them, this hackathon has been a real opportunity to work with new technologies, specifically with the Reactive paradigm.
While one of our Front-end developers said that this was a great opportunity to improve communication and bond with colleagues, another participant said: “I am glad to have joined this project: I have experimented with Marble.js, a useful library to make practical use of RxJs syntax”.
We are now prepared to replicate this type of event in the future, experimenting with new formulas and events, and maybe even extending it to other Teams.
Our efforts to promote creativity and cooperation are still ongoing. Keep an eye out for the next move!
Bitrock’s Reactive Supply Chain is a modern, state-of-the-art, overall scalable and performing system to implement a full-cycle Supply Chain Management System. The solution is totally modular, so to be implemented as a one-stop-shop for a new project or it can be composed and integrated to existing systems using only the needed components. From functional perspective the system has been designed to implement best practices and to provide the maximum flexibility for all industry standards, but at the same time adapting to each customer specific process and workflow. The solution is based on OpenSource technologies covered by Enterprise Support, and can be scaled to manage millions of SKUs, with all data tracked and analyzed in real time. The delivery of the solution can be provided on Customer Premises or on Cloud or in Hybrid ways.
For internal Supply Chain Operators/Customers who:
Our Reactive Supply Chain is an uptodate digital Supply Chain system that scales with business demand and provides best customer experience matching all customer process and system, unlike non-customizable ERP systems which are poorly scaled and not flexible, demanding long time and high costs to be implemented and integrated. Our solution is a highly scalable modular system, implemented on top of the most innovative Open Source technologies (with Enterprise support when needed), capable to enable lean Supply Chain process with real-time analytics and all needed metrics for operation and C-levels with a mid-short term activation & customization time.
Bitrock’s Reactive Supply Chain is designed for:
The achievement of these kind of benefits are enabling Direct To Market models by Supply Chain operators and as well more modern integration (and or self implementation) of eCommerce strategies, increasing Supply Chain operators brand identity.
All systems and components are Dockerized, so to allow an easy deployment both on Premises both on a Cloud solution (adding orchestration services such as Docker Compose, or Kubernetes, or Mesos DCOS). All components are configured to use Kafka and provide even a set of REST APIs.
Message broker technology: Confluent Kafka (opensource or enterprise)
Main components technical architecture references: Java/Scala Microservices, Play for APIs and frontend, Akka (with persistence, cluster, http, alpakka) for distributed logic, Cassandra/MySQL, Elasticsearch, Kafka.
Every Microservice has its own architecture and can use different kind of technologies and data source, to grant the best choice for each specific service goal, but a general onion—architecture approach has been taken to keep when possible an uniformity of service architectures.
Analytics: Apache Flink, Spark, Cassandra, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Kafka.