Creating a culture of learning at Tuenti
“Creating a culture of learning is one of the most efficient ways of injecting passion into a company.
With highly motivated developers who have fun doing what they do and who are constantly looking outside their own cubicles, companies could benefit immensely from all the innovations and efficiencies they would bring. However, instead of having managers trying to impose how, when, and what developers should learn, companies should empower developers to create their own culture of learning.”
Sandro Mancuso — The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride
Although we already had some learning-related practices at Tuenti, such as Friday Tech Talks and Hack Me Ups, I had to read Sandro Mancuso’s book to realize that, when it comes to talking about a “culture of learning” within the company itself, the issue of learning was more than just some individual practices.
In addition, after reading articles by Félix López, Director of Engineering at ShuttleCloud, about the learning culture they have, and other books like “Practices of an Agile Developer”, everything pointed to the advantages of establishing that kind of mentality within Tuenti and, in my opinion, within any company.
Instead of making this post a never-ending story telling you about the learning practices we are putting in place, I will list these practices and we will publish individual postings with details on each one of them. Above all, with this post, I hope to share our culture with people outside of Tuenti and, by the same token, to get their feedback so we can discover practices that we do not have and that work for others.
Our “culture of learning” includes:
- Internal Tech Talks, which take place every Friday, on projects that have been developed within Tuenti and that the teams share with the rest of the company.
- Hack Me Up (other companies call it Hack Day, FedEx Day or ShipIt), an event which lasts around 30 hours in our case where all Tuenti employees can participate in creating something innovative, improve existing functionality or creating tools for everyday use.
- Internal training sessions — we use several technologies everyday: Java, PHP, K8S, React, Android, iOS and so on — From time to time we organize these training sessions so that our engineers can learn new skills and have the possibility to work in another team within the company.
- Communities of practice (as many as there are topics of interest among people), where reading clubs, discussion clubs, group code review, learning a language/technology, etc. can be organized in groups.
- Hands-on coding sessions — we have not held any yet but I really want to organize a session on a Friday afternoon, based on a kata or the like, just to practice and have fun in a safe environment.
- Side projects — we have already had some within Tuenti — are personal projects related to the company, whether related to the product or to the everyday life of employees (like our table football league).
- Engagement in external communities, such as meetups or various events, to share the challenges we have to deal with every day, what we have learned, where we have failed and where we have succeeded, etc. with other professionals in the sector.
As a basis for this culture, we have put a series of values in place which you can also find in Mancuso’s book and which I will tell you about another day :)
