subshell's Lab Day

Anyone who works at subshell is curious, thirsty for knowledge and appreciates freedom and creativity. We encourage this with pleasure: With the Lab Day, we regularly offer time and space for our employees' own projects so that subshell employees can experiment freely and expand their knowledge.

Every two weeks, employees can use half a day to test new technologies and tools, to try out software, to develop new product ideas or to contribute to an open source project.

Depending on your preference, you can work alone or in a team on Lab Day.

And the winner is ...

Anyone who has completed their research or development project will present it to the subshell team at the Lab Cup. Every two months there are exciting presentations, lively discussions and new insights for everyone involved.

After a joint evaluation, the most innovative project is chosen. The winners will receive the subshell Lab Cup trophy filled with sweets.

Some successful Lab Day projects

Some creative projects have so far remained a fantasy, others are being researched further. For us, all ideas that arise in the Lab Days are valuable. Some examples:

• Thanks to a lab project, the Sophora Importer can also use additional Java code when transforming XML, e.g. to prepare images for the import.
• With the LDAP adapter developed in a lab project, e-mail editors and IP telephones were connected to subshell's Sophora-based address database, so that the contacts are now available to everyone in the team everywhere.
• The code editor within the Sophora editor was improved in a lab project to include syntax highlighting, validation functions and auto-completion.
• In a lab day, subshell's Sophora teletext add-on was used to automatically translate pictures taken with a webcam into pixelated teletext pages and display them on a TV set.
• The open source chat tool Mattermost was introduced in a lab project as the central internal communication platform at subshell. With specially written subshell bots, all employees are now reminded of stand-ups, notified of errors in the code or informed about Twitter feedback.
• The long-term lab project O-Neko takes care of deployments of development statuses with Docker and Kubernetes. O-Neko is now open-source.
• The open source project Lombok benefitted from our contributions.