Meals, as the name suggests, is an application to manage meals. It was developed at AOE to manage employee lunch meals. What initially started as a small tool has now grown in to a mature and enterprise ready application, and it’s still growing. It’s been open source ever since, and we love to share it.
When I opened the box of my Roomba back in 2016 there was a sticker saying:
This robot contains an electronic and software interface that allows you to control or modify, and remotely monitor its sensors. For software programmers interested in giving your iRobot new functionality we encourage you to do so.
A little later I first started playing with microcontrollers sending infrared commands to the IR sensor in order to start cleaning via my home network (or specifically by pressing one of the Amazon Dash buttons that came out at that time).
While newer generations of the Roomba product line already come with wifi and cameras I always wanted to be able to add that myself.
Although it may sound a little over-engineered here’s my current project:
Under the top cover of the Roomba there’s a serial interface connector hidden. Using a documented serial interface you can easily send either higher-level commands like start cleaning, stopping, and seeking the dock, or low-level commands like reading individual sensor values, controlling the motors or even playing notes on the internal speaker.
At AOE our most valuable asset is our experience with building complex enterprise applications to shape companies digital transformation, so why do we care about Open Source at all? We grow by learning on new impulses, not by locking ourselves into our comfort zone.
There are few technologies that change as often as web frontend tools, libraries and technologies in the recent years.
With a focus on web development at AOE we have been on the bleeding edge ever since, evaluating and understanding what technologies bring us forward.
Sharing knowledge and experience is what we love, but it took us a long time to establish a format where interested people come together on a regular basis, talking about the newest tech, all cross-team and cross-project.
Keycloak is our go-to tool when it comes to identity management, federating identities over multiple sources and organizing and managing roles for all kinds of applications. Naturally, there is no “one-tool-fits-all”, so Keycloak too sometimes needs to be customized beyond what the configuration offers, and we need to implement providers to add additional configuration.
Gitlab became our main tool for sourcecode and automation over the past 5 years. Naturally, all of our build processes, continuous integration and delivery as well as platform management is completely automated, and Gitlab CI has proven to be a valuable tool.
So how do we organize our pipelines at AOE?
Initially, we have a repo which provides templates and starting points for all of our pipelines, so we can benefit from scaling to any number of microservices without having to think of management overhead.
5 years ago we set started the adoption of the Go programming language at AOE. 3 years ago we open sourced Flamingo, our web framework, created to enable us to build fast and scalable applications. Now, looking back, it was quite a ride raising a flock of small Flamingo’s to form a stable basis for our daily work.
