Product

How to conduct a Hackathon on a budget and with a small team

Per Fragemann Product ,

I bet you’ve heard about the awesome Atlassian Hackathons (“ShipIt days”), which regularly influence the product roadmaps. These hackathons last roughly 28 hours, and end with presentations to the entire company – voting and plastic trophies included. That’s all great if your team consists of 20 or more developers. But what if you’re only, say, 4 developers, and only have limited time?

Hackathon

We took a shot at it anyway, and conducted a mini Hackathon with a twist! At our recent all-hands meeting in New York, we hired a room in a co-working space and sent 4 developers and 4 non-developers. We kicked off with a brown-bag lunch at which ideas were discussed:

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Using SimpleSAMLphp with Small Improvements

Per Fragemann Product

A guest blog post by Christiaan Brand, CTO at Entersekt, Cape Town

ChristiaanBrandNewManaging user identities in a corporate setting is often pretty challenging — even more so if the company is expanding rapidly and trying to integrate some of the best Cloud-hosted tools into their environment.

I’m Christiaan Brand, the CTO for Entersekt, a young, fast growing software security company based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among my other duties, I’m responsible for our general user control ecosystem. One of the first things you have to establish for a company of any size is an authoritative trust source against which users can authenticate. I believe this is something we did right — right from the beginning when we were only the four founders and were only accessing email, our workstations and our one Fedora server. This has allowed us to scale effortlessly to where we are today: more than 60 geographically distributed users, multiple internal and external applications – all with one single user information store.

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