We organise team meetings every few months, but this time we decided to write a blog post about how we spend our time when the whole team is in one place. Read about our productive and fun times in Zagreb!
What on earth is a QTM?
I know, I know … I promised you a fun read and now I’ve started things off with a weird abbreviation. QTM stands for Quarterly Team Meeting, an event we organise to bring our whole team together every three months.
Since joom.team has team members in England, Germany and Croatia, we make sure to meet regularly in person to discuss ongoing projects, exchange knowledge … and to share some fun moments together.
Our latest QTM took place in September of 2019 in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.
Arriving in Zagreb
Thursday started with some calm coffee making … until the doorbell started ringing and our colleagues started arriving. The atmosphere in the office shifted dramatically.
We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months, so the first priority – before the team went into work mode – was coffee, hugs and gossip.
Dev team catchup
Since I’m part of the development team, I spent most of my day staring at code with the other developers (when I wasn’t taking photos for this blog post).
We spent our morning discussing our latest client project, some of our internal projects, crazy ideas for the future, some new guidelines for code formatting and readability and a lot more.
It was great to have our senior developer Zoran with us in person, and each of the remaining devs took turns exhausting him with our questions. We even got around to some actual development work.
Plans for the client team
While this was going on the client team – who focus on client communication, support and project management – were meeting with our two bosses, Jay and Michi, to discuss the future growth of their team.
They wouldn’t let me stay and eavesdrop for long, but I caught wind of a new addition to the team and some interesting changes planned for the rest of the year.
Lunch … and not a moment too soon
I don’t know what the situation in other companies is, but after a couple hours of work our developers start to get anxious and confused. They need food and they need it fast. We ordered in from a local restaurant and ate together.
After eating – and some general catching up – it was time to be productive again. The whole team would spend the afternoon together for some presentations and continuous learning.
Team workshop
Update on Company Plans
First off we received an update on Jay and Michi’s recent meeting in Munich. which featured a mix of the following:
- Plans for the future of the company
- Newly-coined company-internal abbreviations (QMM?)
- Random images of adorable cats in business attire
Internal Project Update
The second presentation came from Zoran, our senior developer. He had lots of interesting things to say about the internal project he’s currently working on: building our own deployment platform to simplify our development workflow in the future.
The non-developers in the team had baffled looks on their face from time to time, but he kept them engaged with his trademark dry humour.
Web Scraping Ahoy!
Jay took the stage again with a third presentation, about the internal project he’s working on – which brings together data mining and web scraping.
He was very enthusiastic and managed to wake the whole team up. He also cleverly bought cans of Red Bull for the whole team which lead to an enthusiastic brainstorming session on the whiteboard.
Afterwork ... time to scoot!
For every QTM someone in the team organises an afterwork team-building type activity. It was time to leave the office and have some fun, but none of us knew what to expect.
We were not disappointed when we found out that our colleague Dalia had organised a fleet of electric scooters for the whole team and a dinner reservation at a Mexican restaurant for later in the evening.
This left us several hours to scoot around the sunny city and spontaneously visit various landmarks, parks and bars. We fired up the scooters and hit the road (actually: pavement)!
Half of the team sped off in one direction, the other half in the other direction. In the city centre we attracted curious looks from passers-by – it’s not everyday you see a dozen IT nerds ride by on scooters.
The two halves of the team rendezvoused at a bar with an amazing beer garden terrace and enjoyed beers and the sunshine.
Across the bridge to see the lake
Where to go next? What to see next?
We decided to cross the bridge over the Sava river and head for a few laps around Bundek, a manmade lake which is a popular spot for leisurely strolls during the sunny days. We got there pretty fast, had some more drinks at a bar overlooking the lake … while some of us decided to take a lap around.
Time definitively flies while you’re enjoying great weather and listening to fun stories from everyone. We even forgot the scooters for a couple of moments.
Dinner a la Mexico
For dinner we jumped on the scooters again on the way to a nearby Mexican restaurant. The only thing better than the food was the music. Sadly, there was no live mariachi band, but hearing it on the speakers teleported us to Latin America.
As a final act of spontaneous love for our eScooters the whole team drove in circles around the parking lot, before heading home.
We had the scooters for 24 hours … so it was the best journey home ever!
An unexpected presentation
On Friday, three developers who had recently finished work on a pretty complex project had the great idea of printing ALL of the code they had written (50+ pages) and laying it out from one side of the office to the other.
This awesome intro kicked off their presentation about a recent project, and the various solutions they had implemented to meet some unusual requirements.
When the applause died down, everyone had stuff to do and people started disappearing. Some needed to catch a plane, others a bus. The office was emptying and scooters were going with them ...
Final date with the scooter
I wasn't going to let go of my scooter so easily. The weather cleared up and we still had them for a few hours. I made plans with a colleague to ride around town a little more after work.
We enjoyed ourselves till the last minute. His battery died at one point and he was forced to push his scooter (with a heartbroken look on his face).
See you in December, team!
All in all we had two very productive and fun-filled days.
I’m already counting the days down until QTM-12-19!
