Our Friday Code Quality Tradition

Here at Imdex we have a weekly tradition thats had a huge impact on our software team.

Every Friday afternoon Luke Grootveld (our Cloud Dev Lead) walks across the office with his laptop. He goes into a meeting room, plugs into a TV, and sets up a one hour video for the team to watch.

We pick something that will help us improve our development skills. For example, right now we’re half way through the Clean Coders series from Bob Martin. Each video is pretty much an hour of Bob barking coding tips at you while performing the dorkiest skits you’ve ever seen. It sounds weird but trust me, it works.

We watch these kinds of videos because improving our skills is important to us. We watch them together as a team because improving our skills as a team is important to us.

Plus it’s just fun. While we learn something new we get to relax, hang out and have a laugh.

Like most companies that have been around for a while, we have plenty of technical debt. But our team is committed to not making any more. We’ve even managed to make some progress cleaning up the old stuff. I think our Friday afternoon video tradition is an important part of that.

The thing is, we have a really ambitious product roadmap. We have heaps of cool stuff that we want to build. So we don’t have time to rush.

“No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess.” — Uncle Bob Martin