One Little Spark

Three months. That is how long it has been since my last blog post. We all remember my first blog post where I explained the importance of being consistent when you are learning to code, right? Well, let’s look at my Github commit history and see if I followed my own advice…

Yikes, I seem to have ignored my own wise words. I fell off the coding wagon from the end of July to the beginning of October. I wish that I could provide a good reason for you, reader. But one thing I have learned is that there’s no good dwelling for long by looking back cause you are just wasting opportunity for the future.

Speaking about taking advantage of an occasion, the company I work for hosted an internal hackathon last week. The goal was for everyone was to work on something that we do not have the time for in a work day or approval for from upper management. My company utilizes the hackathon as an incubator for new features and improvements for our products, workflows, and outreach to the community.

I proposed two projects, one to improve our internal documentation system and the other was a perpetual video chat room where co-workers could talk with one another. The latter project proposal was intended to be more of a joke than anything, a social comment addressing the feeling of loneliness as a result of working from home. My friend and I were discussing something like it (among other ideas) while imagining ways to stay connected in a world isolated because of COVID-19. Anyways, to my surprise, someone signed up to be a team member on the perpetual coffee room project.

As soon as someone else believed in this project, this once silly little idea become something more real, or a figment. Now, as I am an avid Disney fan, it would be a crime for me to not stop everything right now and explain the unoffical mascot of the Epcot park at Disney World, Figment (notice the capital F), the small purple dragon.

As Wikipedia states, Figment is meant to be the literal embodiment of the phrase “figment of the imagination.” His voice is semi-annoying, his humor is the type that just gets a little under your skin, but his relentless desire to discover what could be possible is infectious and makes him a classic for Disney die-hard fans. Much like how I and many other visitors to Epcot are not affectious towards Figment, I also did not love my perpetual chat room idea. With that being said, I did become increasingly attached to the idea as I opened the idea up to others’ imagination and see what they could think of to contribute to it.

The project ended up being a hit and won one of the hackathon awards. We used the recently launched Gather application to recreate a virtual representation of the actual office floorplan. Visitors of the virtual office are given avatars, which are able to freely move among the space. The essence of natural office conversation is emulated by how when two avatars come close enough to each other, the video and microphone of the associated users turn on, providing an impromptu Google Meet environment.

When I proposed this funny sounding project, I never believed it would get to where it got. But I am happy that I let it out of my imagination. It is up to us to bring the things that we want to see in the world to be. And just because something doesn’t exist yet, doesn’t mean that it is not a good idea but just that everyone else has not had the courage to suggest it. Even though it’s debated whether Ghandi actually did or did not say, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” there is something simple and powerful about the statement. The instructions are simple: close your eyes, imagine what would make this world a better place, and then make it happen. Introduce to the the world your Figment.