#masherydev

Here's Reggie on the far right with our awesome NYC crew!

The following is a guest post from Reggie Montilus, who interned with Mashery over the summer of 2014, and made valuable contributions to Hacker League.

As a serial hackathon attendee, Hacker League is a tool I had become accustomed to encountering at each event I went to. A really great way for organizers to keep track of what’s getting built at hackathons, and for the developers to catalog their hacks in one central place. 

Fast forward to Summer 2014, when I began my internship hunt, and through a series of connections I heard that Mashery was hiring a Ruby developer for an intern position. I hopped at the chance because I would not only get an internship, which was my main goal at time, but I would also be working in my language of choice and would gain some production Ruby experience during my stay.

When I was told that I would be working on Hacker League, I was thrilled. I would be spending my summer working on the site that I’ve used numerous amount of times at hackathons. It was exciting, because as a developer,I wanted to work somewhere where I could make a difference, and I saw this as an opportunity to not only work on a meaningful project, but a chance to smooth some of the kinks that I’d personally experienced with Hacker League. This motivated me to give my all to the interviewing process, because more than anything I wanted to make a footprint during the summer that I would be proud to claim, and my work paid off.

Working on Hacker League was a tremendous challenge! During the duration of the internship, I went from having first day internal terror when looking at the confusing source code, to knowing it like I’d been working on it for years.

Hacker League was a site built by hackers for hackers, and I wanted it to be something hackers could be proud of. I made it a goal to be vocal during brainstorming meetings so that I could give some direct user feedback to the people that would able to put changes into motion. My main goal was to help ease the kinks and bring Hacker League to a level where it would be a staple at hackathons.

The site needed to look new, feel new, and feel like the same passion that drives hackathon goers was put into its development. Hacker League worked, it never stopped working, but it needed to be more than that. Luckily I was surrounded by people who were just as passionate about the product as I was, and countless time was spent bouncing ideas off of each other on how the site could improve. 

I began pushing changes almost immediately, tackling many user requests like video embedding and allowing Bitbucket connection alongside Github. Eventually the changes that needed to be made couldn’t be boiled down to simple tweaks to the functionality. We began to evolve the site internally, and I was lucky enough to be at the center of all of it. This process allowed me to gain experience in a large variety of software development areas. I was writing integration and feature tests, aiding in migrating the entire HTML and CSS of the site to a more stable framework, and even helping to migrate the ERB templates to HAML, all while still writing features to be implemented into the site in Ruby. This allowed me to learn all facets of the site and grow as more than just a Ruby/Rails developer.

There is something scary about taking a site and breaking it down and rebuilding it anew. As changes were made and styles were changed I started to notice how much different the new Hacker League is from the one in production, I also started to notice how much more I enjoyed the new Hacker League. Hacker League has always been a site that understood its audience and took pride in them, and this new site celebrates that. 

Without spoiling too much I am proud to say that Hacker League has become something that has the same passion behind it as the community it is designed to serve. As a Hacker League user turned developer turning back to a user after today I can proudly say that Hacker League is something that I’m excited for and I’m sure it will bring some excitement to its users when the new changes go live. (editor’s update, they are now live!)

Lastly I would like to thank all of the members of the Intel Mashery Developer Platform Services team for this amazing opportunity. Although I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting most of you in person, our weekly meetings helped ease the transition from feeling like the new intern guy to someone who was really a part of the team. I’m grateful for giving me the opportunity to learn and contribute.