Learning together

The only constant in software is change. Therefore it is important for us to spend time learning new concepts, languages, practices and technologies.

⏰ Weekly Developer Meeting

Every Thursday all developers meet at 13:30 to learn something new.

Since August 2019, we’ve changed this format to focus more on the fundamentals of programming and software. We had discussions and workshops about topics like complexity, scope, call stacks, data structures and lambda calculus. Apart from discussing theoretical topics from a practical perspective, we’ve also looked into inherently practical problems like performance on the web. All sessions are recorded for future reference.

Before covering the fundamentals we’ve used this meeting to learn things like the Elm programming language, looked at new libraries or browser features, gave internal talks about things we’ve learned recently and watched talks or video courses together.

We have a list of upcoming fundamental topics, which is surprisingly long compared to talking about the latest trends in web development. 🙂

👩‍🏫 Mentoring Program

Since March 2020 we’ve started our internal mentoring program, in which everyone can decide if they want to be mentor, mentee or both. Mentor and mentee meet bi-weekly and discuss which topic to focus on next and how the mentor’s support can look like.

Mentoring can include things like:

  • focusing on specific qualities during pull request reviews
  • reading and discussing internal documentation
  • reading chapters/books together
  • building something together
  • refactoring together

🔁 1on1s

These are bi-weekly casual chats with Ella, our engineering manager. They are mainly about receiving feedback from you.

So if you feel unhappy about something, see room for improvement or need any help/support from us, this is a good time to talk about it.

Additionally these meetings are about your goals. You’ll talk about where you want to go, what you’d like to work on in the future and what you want to learn. We’ll support you.

👯 Pair Programming

When setting up projects or tackling hard problems, pair programming helps sharing knowledge and ideas.

We encourage you to ask anybody to pair with you on things that might be too hard to tackle alone. This can be somebody from your project team, a colleague or your team lead. They’ll always try to find time for you.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Workshops

Whenever there is a general development problem that affects all projects, we come together, discuss possible solutions, spend time to think about it and make decisions.

This is for example how our CSS architecture was defined. We spent half a day talking about our different experiences in working with CSS on small and big projects. Then we came up with a solution/architecture, which solves the problems we frequently encountered.

Whenever there is a topic, where you feel we should find a general decision or where we need more knowledge, talk to your team lead about it and they’ll find a date for the workshop.

✈️ Conferences, Meetups

You have a learning budget and you should use it. 💸 Just talk to us, if you have seen a workshop, course or conference that interests you and we’ll make it happen.

Also let us know, if you plan on going to a meetup. Your colleagues probably want to join. 🙂

📚 Books

We pay for any book that helps you getting better at your job. Just let us know, which one it is and we’ll order it right away.

Before you ask us, take a quick look at our bookshelf though. Maybe somebody else wanted to read the same book as you and it’s already in our library.

👨🏻‍💻 Team Leads

We have a team structure that is based around technologies. Your team’s lead job is making sure you can grow at diesdas and have fun by doing so.

So whenever there’s anything you need or don’t understand or want to talk about: do not hesitate to talk to Güngör, Mitch or Martin. 🙂