All posts by kenzan_admin

August 8, 2016Tech Skillskenzan_admin

School may still be out for the summer, but at Kenzan, the learning continues. We’re big believers in skill development and there’s no better way to learn than from our fellow techies. So in late June, we sent some Kenzanite’s off to Dinosaur JS, a Javascript conference in Denver.

They brought back some new skills that they shared with the rest of Kenzan during one of our Lunch and Learn programs. Their entire presentation covering refactoring, accessibility and Electron was recorded. Check it out below:

June 9, 2016Newskenzan_admin

After a bit of a hiatus, Kenzan held another hack night at our Denver office last Wednesday, May 25. This time out, Russell Perkins, from the Kenzan DevOps team, and David Zuluaga, a Kenzan front end developer, discussed a video game they are developing that uses the Unity engine for a number of gaming systems including the Oculus Rift. They also gave a broad overview of the game engine market, explained why Unity is such a great choice (it’s relatively easy to use and it’s free!) and shared a point of view about why so few gaming companies are successful at creating their own engines.

Chris Pruyne, another Kenzan front end developer, gave an overview of his project: the embedding of a brand-new LED screen and a super-tiny Raspberry Pi Zero into an original 1989 Gameboy DMG body. With those electronics, some soldering, dremeling and case modification that will enable the dremeled out holes to contain X and Y buttons on the original controller board, Chris will be able to play most video games on gameboy, NES, SNES and several Sega systems. He will be able to play just about any of those games with a controller by simply adding a few USB ports.

Doug Melvin, a Kenzan PMBA, brought a Raspberry Pi project, using a slightly larger model to embed a computer, screen and more, in a repurposed external hard drive case. With bluetooth, wifi, ethernet and a number of USB ports, this Raspberry Pi is capable of running myriad operating systems. In addition to this hardware project, Doug presented a python project he has been working on that will manage conference room usage in the office.

Stay tuned for information about our next Denver Hack Night, and if you’re in the New England area, our Rhode Island hosts their own too, so be sure to RSVP.

November 19, 2015Newskenzan_admin

Kenzan, as a professional services company, has a history stretching back over 10 years. Most of this time has been spent outside the public eye, quietly working hard for our clients. More recently, we gradually began increasing our public participation. This blog is a step in the journey.

This journey has been exciting for us and follows in the same path that many others have taken. Like many engineering firms, we’ve always made extensive use of open source code in our projects. Rather than being a cost motivator, open-source projects have simply become best-of-breed for many supporting technologies.

Over time, we’ve taken the steps to make patches and contributions to open source. As any good citizen of the community, you begin to feel compelled to make contributions to the tools you use. In this day and age, it’s no longer a question of whether you should contribute to open source, it’s a question of how much you can contribute.

Taking the next logical step, we’ve started building some of our own open source projects. We’re ready to contribute new ways of doing things or to build missing pieces we haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Our projects, which you can find at github.com/kenzanlabs, span areas from front-end tools to java development and devops.

We have a number of projects under way internally that we hope to be releasing over the next several months in areas focusing on NetflixOSS apps, continuous delivery with Spinnaker and configuration management.

In addition to contributing our code, we have one more thing we want to share: it’s what we’ve learned. Over the years we’ve gained a tremendous amount of experience building microservices, working with NetflixOSS in the cloud, creating HTML5 applications on many different platforms and devices, providing DevOps services and guidance. We’re planning to share our experience in creating best practices in architecture, software design, cloud DevOps and our development process.

To find out more about Kenzan, checkout us out here. And, if you’re interested in the things we’re doing, we’re hiring.