If you follow us on Twitter you probably know by now that a significant group of Intrideans gathered together in Maryland over the weekend for an Intridea Retreat on the Chesapeake Bay. Despite being a distributed team of Rails developers and designers, most of us do see each other throughout the year as we travel to conferences, give trainings, and work onsite with clients. Even so, the retreat was the first time almost all of us were together in one place for a long weekend.
The retreat was held in a charming (yet modern) cabin on the Chesapeake, and while there was no shortage of outdoor activities (like kayaking, ziplines, swimming and rock climbing just to name a few), we also spent an extraordinary amount of time huddled inside the cabin. We organized a multitude of sessions to share tactics, talk about best practices, collaborate on development and design strategy, and share our agile project management methods including Forge and Scrum.
Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi
Many important things resulted from this weekend’s sessions, but most notably:
- Engineers learned more about the design team’s process.
- Designers and engineers formulated better strategies for communicating with our QA team.
- Everyone gained a better understanding of how our technical leaders and project managers interact with clients to keep them informed and satisfied.
- We learned some quick and easy tips on how to play a larger role in the Ruby community.
Most importantly, we came away enlightened and inspired to return to our offices and do more great work. Of course, we made time to kick back too; late-night karaoke with impressive David Bowie renditions, high-energy rounds of Werewolf, competitive Xbox gaming, and mid-day laps in the pool all made it on the schedule. There were homemade cupcakes courtesy of Amelia and exotic varieties of beer thanks to Patti and Jon’s custom BeerConnect session.
Though we return to separate offices across the country (and the world), we bring with us a resonant solidarity and a humble feeling of gratitude for the talents of our fellow Intrideans, for the vision and dedication of our leadership, and for the freedom to work and live in all the different places we each call home. We’re all looking forward to more good design, development, and of course, the next Intridea Retreat!
You can see additional photos of the weekend retreat on our Flickr page!
