the coding offsite

August 01, 2006

We just had a fine day at the Atlas cafe on the first day of our development offsite. We’ve got an agenda, but mostly we spent the day coding. One of the engineers noted that that a day of pure coding was nothing new, but as a manager, personally, 8 hours straight of uninterrupted code feels downright decadent. It’s fabulous to have everyone close by. When you need a code review, there’s an engineer at your elbow. When you have a question, someone across the table has an answer. Sometimes you just need to talk something through with another human being who can nod knowingly and ask the odd question. The whole team is there when you are wondering the best pattern for a new API. Sure, it really ought to be this way at the office, but with business booming some of us are frequently called into meetings. There’s a need for that, but we also need to balance it with a need to create our next gen products.

It feels good to be part of a small company. I proposed the idea of this offsite on Wed night and by Thursday aftenoon it was a reality. Kudos to the management for letting us make it happen. Today we had a great time, being hugely productive, building some awesome apps using OpenLaszlo. Every now and then what you do for work scarily coincides with what you might do for fun. Today was one of those days.

Of course, all things being equal, it would be fun to spend the day at Zeitgeist. As it was, we just spent the evening there. (Sorry no picture to incriminate the team — my camera battery ran out.)

By the way, we’re hiring.

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