The “Labs” concept at Mindsay

At Mindsay, we value and encourage creativity and constantly strive to improve.

People inside our tech team grow with us. We know our product is big and complex with a lot of technical debt. I’s not always easy to grow and learn new things while working to deliver projects on time.

To ensure we all carve out time to learn and improve, we’ve recently launched “Friday Labs” — a day our tech team now dedicates to just this!

If you think you can improve our product, tech stack or your skills, you should have the opportunity to do so. Our developers now use every Friday for this purpose. To ensure it’s a win for everyone, we’ve developed the following format.

How does it work at Mindsay?

In order for this to work smoothly and continue to benefit the company as well as all of our teammates, we require people to check the following boxes:

1. Motivation: if a developer wants to use this time right, he/she needs an objective. It has to be related to their technical stack product, but it can be wide enough to let them explore new fields. For instance, any developer can say “I want to try a graphQL api” or “I want to learn TDD.” It’s not directly linked to the business but can bring long-term value to any company.
2. Time estimation: a hard thing to determine in any technical task. The goal is to do the lab and not delay it forever. There is no real limit, but we try to define the minimum amount of time to have a “Proof Of Concept” that could be useful for the developer and in his/her learning.
3. Manager/team approval: the goal is to have a second point of view on the idea and the right communication across the company and tech teams in general. There is often someone on the team who can help you get started!

Presentation time!

When time is up, developers must make a presentation of their work to their beloved tech team members (or the whole company). Our experiences and learnings are often beneficial to the whole team!

Depending on what was done, the tech team can assess whether the results could be used in production. It would be a shame not to share performance and development improvements with the entire company.

Did it work at Mindsay?

Yes! Since we started, at least one developer has worked on a Friday lab each week. We’ve added Docker support for some projects test suite, allowing any developer to easily setup and test those projects locally; we’ve tested Dash and added it to our analytics scripts, so that generated dashboards are easily read by non tech people; we have set-up a LRU cache on our NLP model loading, drastically reducing our RAM usage. As for me, I have used my Friday labs over the past few months refactoring our third-party widget, factorizing its code, and improving its building time and size tenfold!

So far, all of our POCs have gone into production. We can’t wait to see our newcomers bring their own contributions!