DMC held yet another of its internally famed FedEx Days on the first of May. With our Boston office joining Chicago in the fun, DMC spurred innovation in two cities!
FedEx Day was originally adopted from Drive, a book by Daniel Pink that we read for the DMC Book Club, and from software development company Atlassian. FedEx Day at DMC, though, has definitely come into its own. Now with a bigger staff and more brains at work, the success and scope of this creative-driven initiative has widened significantly.
The core concept of FedEx Day is for engineers to devote an entire day to working on a project (usually an internal improvement project) that they wouldn't normally have the time to do in a typical workday. The catch is that employees must have a tangible deliverable to show by the next day.
This time around, FedEx Day expanded to encompass work beyond just internal improvement projects. Some engineers did indeed improve upon existing interfaces, applications and procedures, but others worked on purely fun projects and demo videos. Whatever project an employee chose though, the main goal was to have fun, follow personal passions, and of course deliver a product of some kind to benefit DMC.
Below are some of the projects that engineers and their teams worked on:
- Development of the VR Labyrinth using an Oculus Rift to explore our tilt table demo
- Development of the “DMC Portal"
- Setting up a Zigbee mesh network and an MQTT server
- Assembling packaged solutions for SharePoint and Office 365
- Setting up WordPress on an IIS server
- Creation of a custom multi-project Visual Studio template that sets up the standard DMC base solution for a WPF application
- Writing of a C# Windows Store application to interface with Anki cars using their open SDK
