Twice a year, all engineers gather at Appcelerator HQ. So last week I enjoyed the soft California winter, San Francisco beer week, friendships, but above all a great time with my colleagues.

Sync vs Async

I really enjoy working remote from home, but a 9 hour time difference does limit the opportunities to (Google) hangout and literally sync with the talented folks I have the pleasure of working with and for. Asynchronous communication via Flowdock, JIRA, Confluence, Jive and of course email is fine for exchanging information, but less helpful for discussing ideas.

Information overload

The week was packed with sessions for sharing information and discussing plans. I learned a lot about parts of our solutions I wasn’t too familiar with, which of course is essential to be able to help out developers in those areas. I also lead a discussion myself, on how to encourage community contributions.

IoT Hackathon

While my friend Wienke from The Things Network was doing an IoT meetup in New York, we spent a night hacking with Particle’s Photon. My team hooked up a Titanium app, Axway API Gateway and Arrow API to Photon which in turn used a servo to ring the gong at the office. Sales uses the gong whenever they close a big deal. Now, they can do so as they walk out of the client’s office! Initially the plan was to hook into Salesforce and ring the gong on every on-demand sale, but that feature didn’t made the deadline.

And guess what, my team won! Wienke will be proud of us ;)