Open Space Day And Serverless

Open-Space Day

There’s nothing better than attending an Open-Space Day to understand Codurance's philosophy. It's an inspiring, challenging, and fulfilling self-organised event in our London office. Every person from the company comes in early to enjoy breakfast together and then the day gets started. After an initial update from Sandro and Mash, everyone gets the opportunity to propose a session to run. They put a colored post-note on the big window and give a brief summary of their session. Sessions can cover any topic, come in many different forms, and quite often they include an open discussion or a hands-on exercise. Everyone in the company is then free to attend any of the sessions that they find interesting. It's a long, intense, enlightening day where you learn and share your knowledge with your teammates. It’s great to be in a place where everyone can contribute to enrich the company's culture, vision, and shape Codurance's future.

Our last open-space day was a perfect example of this unique gathering of passionate Craftspeople. It's challenging to summarise it in a few words but I will try to give you a small taste:

• "Solving logical problems using Graphs and Digraphs"
• "Working with Serverless"
• "Agile Self Learning"
• "An overview of the company's marketing strategy"
• "Leadership and effectiveness"
• "Solving complex math with CSS"
• "Rust and WebAssembly"
• "Apprentices project code review"
• "eClinicalWorks case study"
• “Test Hacking Serverless Offline”
• "Company's wellbeing survey results and discussion"
• "How to achieve quality beyond code"
• "Candidate hiring process"
• "Introduction to Clojure"

These were just some of the sessions available, but are enough to give you an idea of the variety offered and intensity of an open-space day at Codurance. It is not a passive event where you only listen, everyone taking part in the sessions is expected to contribute somehow. No matter if you run your own session or not, at some point in the day you will take part in the conversation. The best part is this happens organically because everyone around you is taking part in the conversation and you ultimately feel involved and encouraged to contribute as well. This is what makes participating in an open-space day such an inspiring experience, you feel part of a community sharing objectives and constantly challenging its own people by asking them to contribute and drive the company towards new goals.

Serverless

Lately one of the best trending topics has been Serverless Architecture. Since many companies are migrating their systems to cloud-based solutions it has become an increasingly popular option to reduce infrastructure complexity and optimise costs and resources. Several of Codurance’s craftspeople had the opportunity to work on them and consequently, they decided to share their experience within different sessions. It was great because during one of the sessions there was an introductory talk and a hands-on exercise testing aws lambdas offline.

Serverless is a cloud-computing execution model, a FaaS (function as a service) where you get an elastic, scalable system, strongly decoupled from both data and computing resources, separately deployable and easier to develop and maintain. Serverless is a viable option that we consider when offering solutions to our clients. It is now recognised as part of the core of our technology expertise. During our last Open-Space Day session, we had the opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of using them and we shared our knowledge about them to make sure that everyone in the company has practical knowledge and experience with this new technology.