Last month we again held our biannual in-person gathering of all Niteans, the IRL. As is customary, we meet somewhere warm for the winter edition of the event. This year we chose Istanbul, Turkey. A stunning city with millennia of heritage.
We’ve gotten good at running IRLs so this one was by far the most productive. We’ve done several improvements to our policy and process (published in our Handbook), set good goals for the year and planned out the coming months. We had technical discussions, we had marketing brainstorms. We had coding sessions in the sun, we listened to lightning talks while sipping Mango Rum (thanks, Marbe!) and we took turns trying to beat Dejan at “foosball”. With a ton of fantastic food in between.
One of the outcomes I personally am most proud of is that we are charging ahead with our purpose, to help improve lives, using information and software as the main driving force. We are doing so by moving into a more mainstream market with our upcoming project so that we will be able to help “regular Johns and Janes” and not just hard-core internet marketers. There’s more: in the past, we have donated to great organizations such as LibreOffice, Wikipedia and Let’s Encrypt. Now, we’ve set it as a company goal for this year to make our impact on such causes an order of magnitude greater. In order to do that, we are 10X-ing our donations in 2018!
Since Niteo has grown a lot in the last year I finally got to meet some of the fellow Niteans in real life. It’s always nice to paint a face over that Slack profile. And go deep on some random topic with someone you only had text-based conversations before. If you work in a remote team, I heartily recommend getting everyone in the same location for a few days. It’s pure magic.
