Hackathon To Live Product — The Parsec Gallery

By Benjy Boxer

We are working on some really fun technology at Parsec, but at times, it’s good to take a break and try new things. For this reason, we held our first hackathon two weeks ago during our offsite in Austin.

Team Parsec enjoying some excellent BBQ at Salt Lick BBQ in Austin, Texas

The rules for our hackathon were simple. Work on something you aren’t working on today and that isn’t in the immediate backlog. All work had to be done between 10am and 6pm in one day, the project had to be publicly available at the end, no commits to production, and our Discord Community would vote on the winner. As a homage to our company name, the winners would receive a Millennium Falcon Lego set that will be passed on to the winners of each hackathon, like the Stanley Cup.

The Teams And Their Projects

Founders — Chris and Benjy (I contributed nothing, hopefully the same can’t be said about Parsec). Chris built an open source project to graph arbitrary SQL datasets using Google Charts. You can define the variables of your query in your URL parameters.

One of the charts created with the Greedo Project.

Home Automation — Jamie and Erik built an Alexa Skill for Parsec. The video below tells you everything, but essentially, they hooked up an Alexa to a Raspberry Pi connected to the television and asked Alexa to connect to Jamie’s Parsec server! It’s not public yet, but we’ll definitely add it soon.

Parsec Gallery — Dan and Jake built a screen sharing tool for Parsec users. Essentially, with a hot key (alt + shift + s), you can capture a moment in a game and post it directly to your Parsec Gallery to share with friends.

Jake and Dan showing off the first Gallery

The Voting And Winners

Although the voting was close, our Discord Community chose the Gallery Project by a slight margin over the Alexa Skill. We took this as an indication that we should implement the Gallery feature as soon as possible, and we’re excited to release that today! By the way, your Gallery is private, but you can choose to share specific photos on social media or elsewhere. Your friends will be able to see those pictures with the direct link only, and they cannot see any of your other photos.

We hope you enjoy posting shots of your epic gaming victories (and defeats) while playing on Parsec.

To the victor go the spoils

Here’s my first Gallery Picture.