Four years ago, I began periodic meetings at We Are Mammoth called Code Meetups. They’re one-hour chats on Friday afternoons where a developer leads a conversation on something they’ve been working on lately.
During our meetups, a developer talks about how they tackled a specific problem, then solicits advice from the group about their approach and what they could have done differently. These talks can be broad-scoped or narrow-focused. And, often times, we end up the conversation in a far different place than from which we began.
When we started these meetings, our development team was largely in-house—there were only a couple of folks working outside our office in Chicago. The Chicago staff would meet in our conference room and we connected with the one or two developers that worked outside the office using GoToMeeting.
Over the past few years, the team has dispersed across the country. As the Chicago office thinned out, we transitioned to a remote-first approach and moved meetups strictly over to video chats. The team in office would stay at their desks and connect online just like the remote team. Code Meetups became a periodic time for everyone to regroup “face-to-face” on an equal playing field.
Eventually, the entire development team was separated from each other, with developers working at-home in Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, San Antonio, New Jersey, Florida and Little Rock. At this point, these meetups started to play a role not just with reviewing and advising each other about code but in helping our team continue to feel connected.
I find maintaining this connection particularly critical within a technical team. As anyone who’s spent time programming knows, having long periods of uninterrupted and quiet time is paramount to programmers doing good work. Disruption caused by meetings and even work environments have long been contentious topics in the development industry.
One of the residual benefits of a remotely-distributed development team is you can escape quietly behind physical distance and actually find those periods without interruption more easily. But, isolation becomes addictive. And addictions usually prescribe an unhealthy dose of what was once a good thing.
Even though we need our time alone, we’re better programmers when we share ideas and when we have a better rapport with each other. Under the same roof, this happens naturally. Apart, this often happens in disjointed Slack conversations or other stunted interactions. Otherwise, we naturally pull toward staying in our busy little corners. Code Meetups became a perpetual way to create a healthy balance between connection and avoiding interruption.
I made Code Meetups entirely optional from day one. It positions our chats as a voluntary gathering rather than something that feels forced each week.
Why the leniency? As a remote company, it’s easy to overcompensate for the lack of natural daily interaction with your team by infesting employee calendars with forced meetings. It also lets our developers know that their quiet work time is just as valuable. The optional decision has had very little impact on attendance—when Code Meetups are on, nearly everyone on the team attends anyway.
Also, since we use GoToMeeting, we record these meetups and upload them into a private shared Google Drive folder. In fact, it’s almost second nature now that we record all of our team and company-wide meetings. Recording meetings means you don’t need to take notes—you can stay present with the conversation. It means if you have to miss a meeting, you can always catch up. It also means you can also revisit any previous conversation rather than go “I remember that one time Jeremy mentioned that one thing about compiling CSS somewhere. What was it?”
The benefits of recording meetings seem obvious now, but it’s not something you naturally think about doing when everyone gathers in the same location.
Many companies using Kin are small (less than 50 employees), remote, and have a technical focus. If you’re one of these companies and you’re looking for ways to improve the communication within your development team, I absolutely vouch for the benefit of weekly, optional, recorded meetups like these.