In one of our posts, we wrote about some traditions and culture in Desmart. I would like to pull this thread and show you how we inspire ourselves and improve our work.
A few years ago, someone decided to launch a radio in our office. It was a very good idea because it significantly improved the atmosphere at work. Employees don’t sit in four walls of total silence where you can only hear tapping on the keyboard. Believe me – the moment when the radio stops playing is a very noticeable annoying silence (our team is addicted to good music).
Let’s get back to the story – a few years ago Desmart was a small company where developers fit in two connected rooms. Radio, called by us “DeRadio” was working 24 hours a day on a PC. The computer was connected to an amplifier with four speakers mounted on the ceiling – such set was ideal until the company grew to a few developers’ rooms.
After expansion of the office, half of it was without music and no one liked it – we are very attached to our traditions and rules. One day, Piotr decided to do something about this silence. First of, we just plugged some speakers with amplifier to an old laptop and played some internet radio stations. It was some kind of solution, but we felt dissatisfied with it – every single part of the office was playing a different kind of music and it was not good for us. Besides that, we have a playlist with about seven thousand tracks on Spotify, and any of the employees can add his own music to it. We just started thinking again how to play this playlist simultaneously in all the rooms and Piotr said that we can try to stream music over LAN.
For this kind of audio distribution called multiroom audio, we needed server which will stream music over network and clients to listen to this stream and play it on speakers, so we need some cheap and energy-efficient hardware to do so. Radoslaw, our CTO said that we can just use one of this little ARM boards, and finally we decided to buy three Raspberry Pi.
