A Elixir Radar, nossa newsletter semanal dedicada a promover conteúdos relevantes e oportunidades de trabalhar com Elixir em empresas de todo o mundo, se tornou um de canal de grande importância para nós. Com mais de 100 edições, aprendemos muito sobre como podemos trazer mais valor para a comunidade.

Com esse aprendizado, decidimos tomar mais um passo para a melhorar a experiência de todos que nos acompanham nos nossos canais e redes sociais: vamos criar uma conta no Twitter da Plataformatec Brasil.

Nesse canal você pode seguir nossos conteúdos em português sobre temas de tecnologia, software e ágil. Além de acompanhar a participação do nosso time em eventos e conhecer um pouco mais sobre a cultura da Plataformatec.

The post Lançamento do Twitter da Plataformatec Brasil first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

Be pragmatic and agile

Plataformatec is a very pragmatic company that is in a constant learning process. We are always alert for possible knowledge acquirement. Empirical knowledge is analyzed with care, we try to document everything for further usage. A good experience is always a candidate for a practice and when it’s not, it becomes useful for future projects or similar situations.

Our practices are continuously being re-evaluated to assure that they still fulfill their purpose. We’re not afraid of deprecating them when it’s needed, but we always collect data from them for continuous improvement.

Teams should share without being afraid

Sharing what you’ve learned is great for helping people and get feedback from them. In the other hand, sharing doubts isn’t easy as it seems. People tend to ask for help in a private context so fewer people know about it. I always remember my teachers saying in the class: “Don’t be ashamed of asking any doubts”. But that happened anyway, because being mocked was never good.

Our team is composed of really nice and helpful people. We enjoy helping people and we share with each other pretty much everything we think it’s interesting. It’s very common to hear someone here saying “a doubt from one person could be the same from another person” or “I may have a right answer for you, but it’s quite possible that someone has a better way to do this”. Doubts can be a great source of feedback and knowledge when they are public. That’s why we don’t usually use private communication tools unless it is something personal.

Open source culture

Like many people, I got to know Plataformatec for its contributions to the open source community. But when I joined the company, I noticed that the open source ideas go even deeper here. I’d say that Plataformatec’s soul is open source not only because of its software contributions but also because of its way to approach everything else.

I’m sure that I have learned a lot about code review and documentation, but the contribution practices here goes beyond that. Lots of things we do are made with the help of the whole team: from pull requests to blog posts, to ceremonies and company decisions. We are very communicative! Take a look at this blog post to know more about our communication processes.

These were the points that I think are the most interesting to share so far. I hope I can contribute more and more to this team and to share what I learn with you along this journey.

The post What I have learned in my first three months at Plataformatec first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

Why communication matters?

It’s known that communication issues results in many software development problems.

Some agile frameworks, such as Scrum, have well defined communication activities like daily meetings and sprint plannings.

Communication is an important subject, not only for software development, but also in many other areas. There are some social frameworks, such as colletive impact and collaboration for impact, that use continuous communication to help people achieve their goals.

Here at Plataformatec, we take this quite seriously as well. We’re always evolving our communication practices, to achieve our goals and to keep our culture strong.

Continuous communication at Plataformatec

We talk a lot to each other. We use Campfire for team chatting, Basecamp for persistent messages and hangouts or skype for face-to-face calls.

Besides the day-to-day communication, we use some agile practices such as daily meetings and retrospectives. Some of these meetings/tools are used inside projects, others inter-projects and finally, we have company-wide meetings. Let’s see how these practices evolved to fit our current Modus Operandi.

Inside projects

Dailies

In order to keep everyone inside the project on the same page we use daily meetings. An important detail here is the client presence. The client’s daily presence helps to avoid re-working tasks, since they know what is happening on a day-to-day basis.

Weekly project meetings

Once a week, every project team also has a meeting with the Account Manager. Our Account Manager is the person who helps the team solve problems at a higher level, typically overseeing multiple projects at a time, so they are not directly involved in the project’s day-to-day tasks.

We have an open communication channel with them, but it’s important to make a follow-up with all the team together. This is to ensure that the team exchanges more information and keep the Account Manager better informed about the project. Then he can provide the team with better advice on how to solve day-to-day challenges.

Inter-projects

Dashboard meetings

Every Friday our company daily meeting gets a new attribution. In addition to company announcements, we also share the projects status, what happened in the current week, new technical challenges, applied techniques, releases delivered, and so on.

Everyone in projects assigns a grade to the project, which can be a value between -1 and 2. A -1 grade means “We are performing really bad” and 2 means “We are performing really well”. Together with the grade we write a brief explanation justifying it.

We start the dashboard meeting analyzing the current and past grades so we can check how the project is evolving. This is important because everyone can have a basic knowledge of how the other projects are moving on and new things that our colleagues are using. Having a big picture of each project paves a way for advice and knowledge sharing.

Company-wide

Company Dailies

Back when the Plataformatec team was smaller, we used to do dailies to exchange projects information and other company announcements, such as new employees or new clients. But as the team got bigger, we had more and more projects teams, and exchanging all that information became complex.

Our dailies couldn’t involve sharing project information anymore, so we changed its purpose, and today we use it to share information at a company level. Information about projects is now shared in the dashboard meetings, weekly.

Weekly reports

We also have a weekly summary email, where we point our project highlights, new leads, new employees, next events. It’s a very good tool for those who lost some meeting during the week.

Monthly retrospectives

Back when our team was smaller, we used to have biannual retrospectives, where we listed our good points, things to be maintained, and points we needed to improve. We also used the retrospectives meetings to do team appreciation, where everyone has the opportunity to congratulate or appreciate someone else’s work in the team.

We used to have one day for this meeting, but as new members joined the team, it was not enough anymore. So we changed to have a monthly retrospective, focused on the good points and the points to improve. Every month we select one or more subjects to be discussed, and quarterly we re-prioritize and list new subjects, if necessary. The appreciation now is done in the Biannual reviews.

Biannual reviews

With the retrospectives occurring monthly, now we have more time in our biannual reviews. We keep doing the team appreciation, and we also:

• check our goal status (Mid-Year review, usually in June or July) and
• present the year analysis in the ending of the year, usually in November.

Kick-Off

At the very beginning of each year, the partners share the company goals and the strategic vision. This is the moment to review where we were last year, where we are now and where we want to be in the near future. It is also at this meeting that we get last year’s balance and financial projections.

One-on-one conversations

The main reason of all these meetings is to give and receive feedback. The communication problem occurs when some information is not crystal clear; the feedback mitigates this problem since everyone has more opportunities to solve one’s doubts.

However, some people have difficulty talking in crowded places, so we created an opportunity for those people too. We have a face-to-face meeting with the HR bi-monthly. Also, all partners have a weekly hour slot on their agendas to receive anyone who wants to talk about any subject.

How to evolve

It’s part of our culture to have good and clear communication. The practices we are using now certainly will not stay the same way forever. Our team is still growing; every year we have more and more projects and people joining us. Adapting and improving these practices are required to keep the company communication evolving.

It may appear that we have a lot of meetings, but they are organized and prepared to be efficient and avoid problems that having only ad-hoc communication could cause. All cited meetings here are timeboxed and have a specific goal. We work hard to achieve the meetings goals in the given timeframe for each meeting.

But beware! This is not about creating new formal meetings per se. You should focus on promoting a healthy culture of good and clear communication, and keeping feedback channels wide open within the whole company is crucial.

And what about you? What are your communication practices? Do you ever changed them?

The post Continuous communication first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

Sustainable work hours

Some companies expect their employees to work overtime when a project gets close to the deadline and it’s not finished yet. When I came to Plataformatec, I discovered that the default here is to work in a sustainable way (40 hours/week). There have been a few exceptions, but we are not encouraged to do so, and the extra hours can be compensated as well.

Software development tools and practices

At Plataformatec we choose to start with a small set of basic tools and practices, adapting as we learn about the project and the customer.

One of the practices that I liked the most and had no previous experience with is the retrospective meetings. If you never heard about it, it’s simple! It’s a meeting that we do at the end of an iteration, reviewing everything that happened: not only the good things, but also the ones that we need to make better, so that we can plan actions to continually improve. For me, it is a very pleasant meeting because it’s an opportunity to recognize the good work someone has done or to search for a solution to a recurring problem. One interesting fact is that we also use retrospective meetings internally, for the whole company itself.

We don’t cut corners

We really care about our customer’s products and the code quality. We don’t like adding ineffective, incomprehensible or quick-and-dirty code (also known in Brazil as “gambiarra”), because we know that it may cause problems in the future.

We know that it’s not that easy to avoid bad code and beginners mistakes, but there is no definitive solution for this kind of problem. Here at Plataformatec we use two tools to achieve a greater level of code quality: our guidelines and a simple process called code review via pull request. If you’re going to adopt just one of these practices, choose Code Review.

Every single line of code matters, that’s why it’s better not to put all that responsibility on just one person’s shoulders. The code review process can help with that. When doing code reviews, everyone in the team is accountable for the code that is being shipped, not just the developer that created the pull request.

Before working here, I thought pull requests were only an open source practice, that it didn’t have place in commercial projects. It was really mind blowing to see how it works on a daily basis. We reduce errors, ask for help to an experienced programmer, learn about features of frameworks and languages, discuss algorithms… it is an awesome communication tool, and the best part is, all that communication happens in the context of the source code.

Focus

It’s simple: we do software development, we work hard to improve the way we do it and to become one of the best references on it. The whole company works as a team, and everyone shares the same goal. It means that the salespeople close the deals with terms that developers and managers can work in a healthy and challenging environment, and, most importantly, the customers know what to expect from us.

Knowledge sharing

It was a surprise to me when I came here and saw that all of my new coworkers love the programming community and that most of open source work is done during their free time. We are frequently encouraged to contribute to open source, attend to local and international events, write blog posts, present talks and discuss software development subjects on our Hacking Evening every Tuesday. Best of all, you don’t need to do it alone, there is always someone to lend you a hand. Knowing these people and working with them motivates me and help me love more what I do every day.

That’s all I had to say for now. Working at Plataformatec has taught me a lot of good lessons and I know I still have a lot of things to learn. I selected the practices that I liked the most and wanted to share.

Do you have any practice that you appreciate? Tell us about in the comments below!

The post 1 year working at Plataformatec first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

We’d proudly like to announce that, due to their contributions, two specific members of our team were recently awarded by the Ruby on Rails community (by the Rails Core Team, to be more precise).

Without further ado we’d like to congratulate our fellow Carlos Antonio (@cantoniodasilva) and Rafael França (@rafaelfranca) for honorably earning the commit access to the Ruby on Rails repository!

@cantoniodasilva and @rafaelfranca

Guys, congratulations! \o/

We are all very happy for this great achievement. Great work!
From your friends at Plataformatec.

The post A praise for a hard, sweaty and great work done first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.