Open Source Lounge Continues to Thrive

By: Dan Kaplan, Sr. Software Engineer & Culture Guild Leader

Back in November, we introduced you to the Open Source Lounge. The Culture Guild wanted to provide an update on the progress of how this event has been going and what we have learned.

Two things we learned from the first Open Source Lounge were that attendees really responded to working on a specific directive, and they enjoyed pairing with others to attack a problem. Thus, our more recent Open Source Lounges have been built around projects we care about and that also emphasize teamwork.

Back in December, the Open Source Lounge focused on the Rubinious Project. Our very own Brian Shirai, a core contributor to Rubinious, led the Lounge. Rubinious is an implementation of Ruby designed for concurrency that uses native threads to run Ruby code — fast! We have begun using it intensely at Enova. The Lounge was a great way to further educate everyone on the benefits and technical workings of Rubinious. We also split into small groups to work on bug fixes and implement Rubinious support into our own Open Source Projects.

In February, the Open Source Lounge focused on HeartBeat, a tool we use to measure our values and happiness at work on a weekly basis. The Open Source Lounge provided another opportunity to educate attendees on why HeartBeat is important to us. It also provided an outlet for everyone to work together on new features.

In the future, we hope to make the Open Source Lounge a monthly occurrence. We also plan on making it a public event to show off Enova’s commitment to the Open Source world.

Stay tuned for more updates!