New year faces new challenges but now I would like to sum up last year. It was a special and intensive year when we have done brilliant moves. Visuality and the whole team have gotten new skills and abilities. It's even hard to list them all. I try to do it chronologically and keep it short.
Visuality Academy
At the beginning of the year, we decided to invest to teach juniors. About intentions, Michał wrote in the ‘Visuality Academy for wannabe Junior Engineers’ article. I might create a big article about results, difficulties, and lessons but now I would like to sum up it in a few points:
- Over 200 candidates registered,
- 6 months of intensive work where the group was reduced to 6 best candidates. The level of candidates was strong,
- Crowned by 2 days of workshops in the Visuality office,
- 3 skilled juniors hired and even more people ready for being a junior programmer
Thanks Oskar Lakner and Nerds Family for this fascinating journey! It was a pilot run so, there were ups and downs but we managed it. It was a great experience and we learned a lot. There is a plan to repeat the process after some time.
Conferences and Courses
This year was essentially about learning - we attended conferences:
- ILoveDev. As Michał wrote in the article 'I Love Dev was a professionally prepared event, which broaden our horizons and increased motivation for growth'. We have met new passionate developers and topics pushed us to dive into DDD more.
- Wroclove.rb is in my opinion the best ruby conference as there are always multiple senior-level presentations. On top of that, this year, Paweł our senior developer and consultant was a speaker. You can read more about Wroclove.rb in Patryk’s article.
Additionally, We have finished a lot of courses this year:
- Legacy Fighter - Refactoring approach for pros, DDD, Event Storming, CQRS, communication
- Rails Architect Masterclass by Arkency - Domain Driven Design, Rails Event Store, and a lot more,
- Event Storming online course with Mariusz Gil from Bottega IT Minds,
- AntyIF by Arkency - refactoring in ruby for junior/mid developers,
- Architektura na Froncie - architecture of frontend applications for senior developers,
- Droga Nowoczesnego Architekta - architect course for senior developers,
- other smaller courses
The most important for sure was Legacy Fighter. This course instilled a passion in us for DDD and Event Storming.
Domain Driven Design(DDD)
As I mentioned above, currently Domain Driven Design is one of our main priorities and passion. From first inspiration to execution in a short time. Through modular monoliths to full DDD. We are swimming so fast in that direction. We have managed to organize 2 DDD editions of the Warsaw Ruby meetup. We have DDD articles series written by Paweł, who has also created a group of enthusiasts and we are planning online webinars and courses this year. Stay tuned
Event Storming
Legacy Fighter, DNA, I Love DEV and a lot of other sources are presenting Event Storming as a great workshop tool, so we have decided to try it out in practice. During this year, we published two articles about it on our blog (My article ’We started using Event Storming. Here’s why!’ and ‘Our journey to Event Storming’ written by Michał Łęcicki). An important fact is that the new approach has replaced completely the old way of doing workshops. We have done a lot of sessions this year and we are still impressed by the value which we gathered from those workshops.
Miłośnicy Ruby Community and Warsaw Meetups
Visuality is the host and main organizer of Miłośnicy Ruby Warsaw Meetup. It is a great pleasure to observe how the community grows. On each meetup Visuality members had at least one presentation and lightning talk 💪 We are happy to share our passion with others. If you are interested in the summary of these meetings, you should read Michał's article.
On top of that we have made multiple presentations on the Poznań Ruby Users Group and Białystok Ruby Users Group. DRUG and KRUG are on our radar.
Visuality Blog
Something we are particularly proud of is the reactivation of our blog. We have managed to write 26 articles last 8 months. Only valuable articles, no marketing articles like Go vs Ruby :D We provided articles for juniors and seniors. We have currently 5 articles in pipeline 🙂
Consulting department
Our range of services expanded. The new position is where we can decide the most crucial technology and business moves for the project. We have hard and soft skills to help our clients grow. As a technology leader, we can consult and build the proper architecture tailored for each business need. Basically, from architecture, through DevOps and backend technologies to frontend and user experience.
Poltrax
Last but not least. Poltrax is our successful startup which provides GPS tracking for races. Idea born from passion. In the beginning, nobody expected that the popularity might be that high in the first year. You can read about it in dedicated articles series.
Other initiatives and achievements
- Mentoring process - all juniors and some mid-level developers had a chance to improve thanks to our mentors,
- New recruitment process,
- We reactivated our front-end meeting. Not regular like backend meetings but we have learned a lot from them,
- We hold backend meetings and there are more and more interesting topics, I have written about them here,
- We come back to the office, not obligatory but a lot of us used this opportunity on daily basis,
- There are more positive changes in Visuality but I have focused on technical ones.
What next?
As you may expect we don’t stop. There will be more meetups, articles, presentations, courses, conferences, DDD, stormings, etc. On top of that we are ready for a new challenge… what do you think about:
- DDD webinar?
- Visuality workshops?
- new development conference?
Everything is thanks to the Visuality team, the best team. Keep going!
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