Product

Airtame is a wireless streaming device which helps people work better. It’s powered by embedded Linux on custom-built hardware, with a diverse software stack ranging from our carefully-tuned firmware and high-performance C++ streaming engine, to our cross-platform Electron/React desktop application and Golang Cloud platform.

Technology

How do you make video streaming with high quality and low latency work in poor network environments? How do you integrate four different operating systems? How do you scale cloud backend to support tens of thousands of concurrently connected devices? These are just some of the many difficult challenges we face every day, and we work hard together to solve them. It’s an exciting opportunity to work alongside software, hardware and firmware deliverables with tasks that aren’t repetitive.

We have experts across the entire spectrum of technology. It gives everyone the chance to learn what they don’t know and challenge their own way of thinking. More than that, it’s a unique spread of technical knowledge, something we put it to good use every day working with the complexity of the product. Team structures are fairly flexible, and we’ve had several people start working in a specific range of activity, then gradually move to other areas of problem-solving.

Our talented engineers work with different tools, languages and types of infrastructure, and they are driven towards producing high-quality, maintainable code and software. Frequent code reviews, linting, and pairing are all integral components of our engineering culture. Significant ownership and responsibility over projects is key to our organization. Every developer is able to have a an impact on the direction of the product, and the company as a whole.

Our engineering teams

Streaming team:

In charge of the high-performance streaming pipeline, written in C and C++. And our cross-platform Application, made in Electron and JS.

Cloud team:

Working on the cloud-based administration portal for the Airtames and our upcoming internal digital signage platform called Homescreen. The tech stack here is Golang, React, AWS.

Firmware team:

Leading the efforts on the OS running on the Airtame. They cover everything from the bootloader, Linux kernel, to networking and graphics.

Infrastructure team:

Making sure our internal and external services are up and running. They do Docker, AWS, Ansible, Puppet and Jenkins.

QA team:

Ensuring the quality of our releases. They focus on both automated and manual testing. The tech stack is Python, JS and Jenkins primarily.

Community

In the past, people have relocated to work with Airtame’s Engineering team, and we pride ourselves for our sense of community.

Work is a nice mix of laidback and laser-focused. We know when to work hard, but we make sure to have fun along the way as well. Once per quarter, we host internal hackathons to get the creative juices flowing. No idea is too big, wild or crazy, and some of them might even be implemented afterwards. We value a relaxed environment where socializing is encouraged, but never mandatory. Sometimes, we even pack our toothbrush and go off-location. Here’s the Airtame team at the last offsite event, Workathon 2017 in Corfu, Greece.

Flexible work hours make all the difference to balancing work/life. That’s why 20% of an engineer’s working hours can be used to work on anything they want. It fosters creativity and independence, and we know for a fact that hobbies can lead to solid ideas of implementation.

We’re remote-friendly, something that has been put to good use by several engineers in the past. Airtame is made up of many different nationalities and clever minds, and no one should feel weighed down by the fact that they’re far from home.

Check out this Favro board we made about the Airtame culture.

What does the team say?

“Airtame is a great place for engineers who thrive on learning. I really enjoy our team breakfasts and roundtable discussions, where I can level up my knowledge in areas ranging from hardware design and kernel development to browser APIs and frontend frameworks, plus lots more in between. With 20% time, quarterly hackathons and flexibility to move between projects, I’m constantly developing my skill set, which helps keep my work fresh and engaging.”

Andrew Keating, Lead Software Engineer

Join the team!

See the full list of job openings here. To learn more about what others think of us, take a look at our company overview.

Ready to join our ambitious team? Send your CV and application to tech-jobs@airtame.com letting us know why you would be a great fit. We can’t wait to meet you!

The post Why join the Airtame engineering team? appeared first on Airtame.

What is a hackathon anyway?

A hackathon is a time-limited event where the engineering department, UX and design – even marketing and sales – come together to collaborate on a project with a particular focus. The time limit forces participants to boil down visionary concepts to concrete, applicable solutions.

While hardware and software teams often work alongside, hackathons give them the place to collaborate on creating something new, or solving a specific issue. Besides finding an answer to internal workflow problems, hackathons could help the business innovate new ideas.

At hackathons, participants shuffle teams around and work with no restrictions to the project, which unleashes people’s creative energy even more than in day-to-day operations.

The sky’s the limit at any hackathon because of the casual, creative environment. In our experience, they can invigorate the entire team by boosting these four essential areas:

• Teambuilding

  Just as it is great for problem-solving, hackathons work as a bonding exercise too. We have people from many different backgrounds and nationalities working together, and hackathon events push all members to unite and brainstorm. Bringing together the entire team is a great opportunity to share insights and knowledge while also learning from each other.

• Innovation

  We can’t afford to stop focusing on product development, no matter how well our growth efforts are coming along. We want to do better, and we can’t do that without giving center stage to the engineering team on a continuous level. Just as customer needs change, so should our product. Hackathons help predict and improve that development.

  Even though we’d like it to be, problem-solving is rarely a linear process. The creative environment of hackathons allow new ideas to flourish in a vigorous way, creating a ripple effect throughout the entire company. Suddenly, people not within the engineering team start to realize the endless amount of technical possibilities that can be achieved when the team works together.

• Company culture

  Hackathons give everyone an opportunity to try another, unconventional role and discover other challenges and ways of thinking than usually.

  The time spent understanding other areas of expertise, their particular technicalities, abilities and challenges, gives a more detailed level of insight that can be applied afterwards. Besides working together in less typical groups, it helps the team see the company as a cohesive unit.

• Recruitment & branding

  Every tech company and startup want to be perceived as “hacker-friendly”. Certainly because we believe it to be true and something our whole business is founded on, but also because we gain awareness, even if the hackathon is only internal. This helps attract top talent and continue to push already onboarded talent to bigger, better things.

How we do hackathons at Airtame

Airtame builds hardware, firmware and software, all platform-agnostic, which means there are numerous opportunities for exciting projects and creative freedom.

We do not have strongly divided departments at Airtame, and we work together towards a common goal on a daily basis. However, hackathons still provide us with the chance to tie together different perspectives and touchpoints in a risk-free environment, and that is both refreshing and exciting.

We host 3-4 hackathons each year at Airtame, and they are usually restricted to a 48-hour period. As you can imagine, those two working days are buzzing with bright ideas and imagination. The whole office is lit with a vibrant energy that feeds through all departments.

The hackathons we host differ each time. Sometimes they are company-wide, other times confined to one department that dedicates it to a specific consumer-related pain-point. We often have a theme for the hackathon that participants must gravitate towards. At our last hackathon, the theme was “space” – not for any particular reason other than we’re a bit occupied with our office space at the moment because we’ll soon be moving to a new HQ. Hence, space is on everyone’s mind!

There are pros and cons to both setups. It’s not easy to manage an all-team workshop for several reasons, one being that it takes focus away from directly revenue-tied tasks, and second because the coordination is a pain. On the other hand, hackathons build a bridge to the world of developers. They offer a different perspective the engineering team couldn’t think of besides supplying the technical swag other departments lack.

Organized chaos = lots of fun

Yes – fun! It’s something we prioritize, and we’ve taken it to the next level for all employees several times, most recently for a Workathon in Greece! Our workathons give us the chance to work cross-team in a different environment, and they function both as a team bonding exercise and a work sprint.

While hackathons are not mandatory, it’s an essential part of our company culture, which is why we strongly encourage everyone to participate – unless they have a pressing issue. We also encourage working in teams, but working allow is allowed too.

The pursuit for “the perfect hackathon” …

Hackathons give the freedom to work on something completely different and come together in a stimulating environment. At hackathons, we can all learn from each other and gain inspiration from other areas of expertise.

Whether it’s a technical workflow issue or a new innovation free of restrictions, there should be room for fun while figuring out the best solution.

What does the perfect hackathon look like? It’s hard to say, but we do know it involves lots of pizza!

Have hackathons helped your business? How do you do them? We want to hear all about it!

The post How and why we do hackathons at Airtame appeared first on Airtame.

News ?

Probably the best streaming ever for professionals

Our firmware team outdid themselves.

In this 2.2 update, we revamped the streaming process. The Airtame device now receives and displays content from your computer better than ever before. We’d go so far as to say that Airtame offers probably the best streaming ever for businesses.

With this new streaming experience, there are:

✅ No more video/audio artefacts for silky smooth video playback
✅ More predictable delay between the computer and TV

This involved a lot of refactoring. The new code is cleaner, so it’ll be even easier to build on top of it when we develop new features. This also means we’ll be able to find bugs and fix them much faster, if bugs do happen.

Improvements to Airtame Cloud

Airtame Cloud, for those unfamiliar with this feature, lets you manage multiple Airtame devices from the Cloud without having to get up from your desk. Because life’s too short to spend time walking from Airtame to Airtame.

This update includes 4 major updates to Airtame Cloud:

✅ Update and reboot your Airtame device remotely
✅ Organize your devices into groups by location, or basically anything else.
✅ Keep tabs on what your device is up to, e.g., streaming, installing a firmware update, or displaying a dashboard.
✅ A fine-tuned look for an even sleeker user experience.

Interested in signing up for Airtame Cloud? Create an account here.

Improvements ?

Better at loading heavy dashboards

We’ve optimized Airtame’s resource consumption, which means more resources are available for those heavier dashboards.

More intelligent understanding of device’s behavior

We improved how we collect statistics on the Airtame device’s resources. This information helps us understand how devices behave after a long time without rebooting.

Smoother setup for some enterprise networks

The Discovery protocol that we use to let your computer know that there are Airtames on your network is now following the SSDP standard. This will fix a small problem some enterprise setups had where Airtames couldn’t be found on the network.

Even more network support

We’ve introduced support for Aruba Airgroup discovery. If you use Aruba’s AirGroup, you’ll be happy to know that you should have no problem finding Airtames on the network.

Bug fixes ?

Another day, another bug squashed. Here are some of the things we fixed:

We took care of an issue where the pin code wasn’t displaying, while Pin Code Connect was enabled. Sounds annoying, but now you shouldn’t have any problems.

Before this update, if you plugged Airtame into your TV before your TV was ready (e.g., not turned on yet), it would get a little confused and wasn’t able to detect the right screen resolution. With this update, whenever the TV is ready, Airtame will figure out what the best resolution for your screen is. ?

When you tried to disconnect from WiFi, the button wasn’t completing the disconnect (ugh). We took disciplinary measures, so it’s behaving as it should (yay!).

Go update your device ?

Ready to update your Airtame device? Here’s how to check if you have the latest firmware.

Next to your listed Airtame device, click the gear ⚙ icon. In the Device Management window, click the ‘Updates’ tab. This window will tell you what firmware is running on your device.

?Just a tip for Cloud users: after you update to 2.2, you can control when your devices update from the Cloud. To do this, you should switch off automatic update in your settings.

Questions? Feedback? Write to us.

The post Airtame 2.2: Probably the best streaming ever for professionals appeared first on Airtame.