At #Valuemotive, we believe that constant learning is an indispensable tool for every career and organisation. For that reason, Friday Hacks was proudly introduced to our company.
In short, Friday Hacks is an informal and fun event that takes place on most Fridays at 13:00 at the Valuemotive office. We love playing with an interesting piece of tech and usually have a discussion about it with an expert present. We usually weigh up the pros and cons of using the tech at work, and always end up learning something new!
Everyone having a good time talking about a technical issue
So far we have played with image recognition using YOLO, AWS Lambda + Serverless framework, Apache Airflow, Rust and Elm.
What is the purpose of Friday Hacks?
There are many reasons why we think Friday Hacks is an excellent idea for Valuemotive.
First and foremost, it is not an understatement to say that modern technology is constantly changing and evolving. This means that developers across the globe are perpetually pushing the limits of their knowledge and the programming languages they work on. Friday Hacks is an enjoyable educational activity that enables our software developers to update their knowledge and have fun with one another at the same time!
Secondly, we strongly believe that it’s important to ensure that our software developers have a healthy dose of exposure to new ideas and concepts. In a Friday Hacks session, Valuemotive’s software engineers will have a chance to see how their colleagues think and get a feel for the ideas that they are generating on a weekly basis. This will in turn improve our software developers’ problem solving and brainstorming skills.
Last but certainly not least, the engagement of Valuemotive employees is something we’d like to bring out as much as we possibly can. As previously mentioned in the interview with our data scientist — Kristian, in order to ensure optimal efficiency and productivity output, our people often choose to work at customers’ premises. Consequently, it becomes challenging for us to maintain and build a concrete sense of belonging and working culture. It is also something that we need to learn to tolerate as it is an immutable nature of our IT consultancy. Therefore, we genuinely believe that Friday Hacks provides a-more-than-perfect opportunity for Valuemotive’s employees to spend time together and get to know each other better by discovering and discussing new technical challenges.
Discussing time!
How is it executed?
Step 1: Ideas
It all starts with one passionate Valuemotive dev who wants to share about what they’ve learnt with the rest of us. There are lots of different ways as to how our developers generate ideas. It could be about a technical problem that they encounter at work that inspires them to acquire more knowledge about that particular issue. It may also be a tech-related article or magazine that one happens to come across and decides to talk to others about. The developer will prepare a base (a template, some scripts) for others to start with.
Our Friday Hacks on the topic of Kubernetes
Step 2: Slack announcement
Matias — our competence and well-being at work rep — makes an announcement on Slack (our main communication channel) about the upcoming Friday Hacks event, informing others about the topic as well as methods of delivery.
Step 3: Refreshment check-ups
We make sure there’s enough beer and other refreshments in our fridge!
Step 4: Show time!
We ensure that we are set up (AV, etc.) and we gather people up for a good time.
People engaging in a Friday Hacks session :)
Thank you very much for reading our blog! Stay tuned for more blogs from Valuemotive in the future.