The development done in Bucharest is centered on creating analytics for various social platform activities. In 2018 we had 3 teams working hard on taking the product to the next level. We’ll be more specific later in this post.

When working hard building something to the best of your abilities, you tend to forget to reflect on what you’ve done to learn and celebrate. Combined with the fact that our deliverables were in schedule and we also wanted to talk about what’s going to come in 2019, we decided to change the office scenery for 3 days and do something different.

Day 1:

We got the equipment ready.

Ate something along the way.

Approached the cabin via an enchanting road.

And we arrived at a cozy cabin in the middle of nature.

The rest of the day, we mostly got used to working from that new environment. Setting up the access point, projector, gaming console :) and getting to know the drills around our temporary office. We still had work planned in the sprint, so people were deploying with their feet up:

The day ended with, not surprisingly yet very thankfully, a barbecue!

Day 2:

Everybody got up at their own schedule and continued sprint work … being in pyjamas was not an excuse.

Our VP of software engineering, located in Vancouver, Canada, was filling us and the italian office in with the latest updates across the organization at 6 AM his local time.

The director of the Bucharest development office received a golden vest which is a pun from the “stock vesting” term, but more importantly it’s to celebrate 4 years of her helping Hootsuite grow. Happy vesting, Kiana!

After the transatlantic conference was over, we took a trip through 2018:

What we accomplished in 2018, frontend, backend, QA:

• Added new metrics (for Campaigns, Assignments, Team metrics)
• Enabled display of two sets of data in the same chart for comparisons
• Experimented with a new social media listening product (Hootsuite Explore)
• Enabled other providers of metrics to expose their data through our product
• Enabled developers with Machine Learning skills by offering a Machine Learning course
• Enabled year over year reporting by extending available data from 3 months to 13 months
• Reduced load time of reports by 30x
• Reduced costs and effort to manage our processes by moving them to management services such as Kubernetes and Fargate

And many, many more deliverables that are too geeky to explain in this post.

After 2018 was over, we took a look at what we had planned for 2019. We’ll tell you about it next year ;).

Gave ourselves a round of applause and celebrated with sparkling wine.

The night continued with drinks, board/video games and various debates.

Day 3:

It was Friday and because traditionally at the office we have pancakes on Fridays… we came prepared. After lunch, we took a few minutes to snowball fight.

And continued with some group exercises:

• Long term vision: Shuffle and form 3 teams and envision how you, as a developer, would like to see the development process a few years from now
• 2018 Retro: each person wrote things according to 3 categories: Start, stop, continue doing. We grouped the answers and saw what were the common things that we wanted, disliked, respectively liked, in order to build a better 2019

We had previously done a variation of this event. Next time it will probably have another format.

This time we worked on various projects and looking back was imperative for us to learn how much we have built and grown, giving us the confidence to tackle bigger challenges in the future.

What we can say a common benefit in these types of events was the fact that it brings us closer as a group, encouraging us to go the extra mile even when it’s risky, because we know: if I failed alone, I can always rely on a colleague to help me succeed!

— — — — — — — — — — 2018 is a wrap, y’all! Let’s go!!! — — — — — — — —