#FeatureWeek — #AYearInReview — Part 3

Its Xmas time, which means countless mince pies, repeats on the TV and you being left with all of the coffee flavored chocolates at the bottom of the sweet tin (Who ever thought making coffee flavored chocolate was a good idea anyway?)

But December also means hundreds of those ‘review of the year’ things, and we don’t want to be left out. So in part 3 of our extended #FeatureWeek event we take a look back at 2019 with our very own #AYearInReview and not a single coffee flavored sweet in sight!

What was most on our mind in Q3?

• We started a fantastic ‘how to’ guide for building an electron app with Redgater Mark — these are well worth a look
• The 4 key metrics from the brilliant Accelerate book become living and breathing things in our teams
• Down Tools Week!
• We launched our own meetup events with #LevelUpMeetup

July 2019

Product Manager Ben started July be sharing the importance of conducting your own competitor research over relying on people trying to sell you their services. Read more here

Software Engineer Mark kick-started a series of blog posts with a step by step guide on how to build an eletron app from scratch. This series had huge following across the remainder of 2019. See where it all begins here

We don’t do things by half here. So when Head of Product Delivery Chris proposed running an entire department (That’s about 120 people btw) retrospective it didn’t really phase anyone (Other than the poor soul who had to get the cakes…). But it proved exceedingly useful (And the cakes exceedingly good). Find out what we discovered when we ran a retrospective for an entire department here

July also saw the crazy twitter-storm around 10x engineers and how being a superhero meant you could (Allegedly) get away with being a bit of a douche. Development Manager Ben has been round the block a bit and shared why he thought this was a really stupid thing to aspire to. Read this post here

We revisited how our experiment with a zero bug policy was going again in this post with Redgater Gareth providing an update from some of the teams trialing it here

One of the areas we’ve really focused on in 2019 is adopting Thoughtworks Tech Radar. In this post Jeff shares the latest Tech Radar for Redgate here

Surprisingly enough we don’t pull a lot of our practices out of thin air. Many of the things we try we’ve picked up from fantastic books and talks from others who tread the path before us. In this post Chris shares four books that really shaped how we work here

Related to the last link, we really brought into the Accelerate 4 key metrics as useful measures for our teams. So in this post Gareth shared what we were intending to do with them here

August 2019

Summer was in full flow and August means only one thing at Redgate. Our annual Down Tools Week event started. In this post here Redgater Ben shares what it is and why we do it. For good measure Engineer Chen shared what his team had been up to in DTW here

Redgater Matt discussed the Double Diamond model for the design process. One of the tools we use here at Redgate when it comes to design. Read more about the model here

September 2019

In September we conducted another experiment, this time with you, our followers as we ran our first social media retrospective. Find out what we found out about you by reading Ben’s post here

We’re big on retrospectives here, quite literally if you’ve read how we ran one for our entire department of 100+ people. But in this post Redgater Chris shares tips on how to keep retrospectives engaging beyond just doing lean coffee every two weeks. Read more here

Ever worked with a shark? Not a common question you may think unless you worked as an extra on the set of Jaws. Well Redgater David has, find out more about sharks, goldfish and the dolphin model in this water based post here

Across 2019 we’ve done a lot of sharing and learning. But we wanted to open the doors up even further, so in this post Redgater Ben shared why we were going supersize with the launch of our own #LevelUp meetup events. Read more here

Teams change all the time, whether we welcome it or not. So at Redgate we experimented with inviting everyone in our teams to decide if they wanted to move. Are we mad? Possibly. But find out what happened when we did a department wide team self-selection in Redgater Chris’s post here

Our Development Managers have an interesting role here. 3 key elements of delivery, coaching and people mean its never quiet, always different and can be extremely challenging. Development Manager Priya shares what a typical day (Non spoiler alert — there isn’t one!) looks like for her here