Dev Roundup
Software Development Team Retros Done Right
After a long week of implementing features, writing unit tests, and staring at tmux panes in the terminal color scheme du-jour, you might be eager to leave the office on a Friday evening.
You’d be tempted to run from your monitor, hastily shoving your laptop into an overcrowded messenger bag, forgetting to zip your coffee-stained hoodie as you shoot a “HAVAGUDWEEKEND” behind you to the closing office door.
But, my brother or sister dev, you’d be missing out on so much.
What’s This Dev Roundup Thing?
At Philosophie, we software developers look forward to the weekly Dev Roundup.
Most Fridays at 5pm, we devs wrap up our projects, choose a beverage from our well-stocked fridge, and make the hallowed pilgrimage to our accustomed conference room with laptops in hand.
We share stories from the trenches, reflect on the team, trade tips and tricks, and enjoy a beer and a few lulz with our fellow devs.
What Do You Do?
Setting up laptops in our customary positions around the table, we pop bottlecaps and swap client project stories. Eventually someone remembers to turn on the TV and someone else steals the screen, revealing a project README on a GitHub repo. “In a minute,” you remind them, “we gotta do business first.”
The Roundup begins.
The Doc
Before the Roundup — all through the week, in fact, but especially just before Roundup — we contribute to The Doc. The Doc is a shared Google Doc with headers for the date of each Roundup and the content that follows. Like some sacred text chronicling Roundups since time immemorial, The Doc gives us insight into our collective past.
The most recent header has today’s date. Under the header are two subheaders: Issues (Srsly) and Show and Tell (Lulz).
Srsly
The Srsly section consists of business- or process-related issues.
Having trouble on a project? Concerned about the lack of a JavaScript style guide? Want to suggest an alternative hosted CI service? Add it to the Srsly section.
We dedicate as much time as needed to the issues in the Srsly section, but in practice we don’t spend much longer than 15 minutes per Roundup going over them.
This section allows us to field issues as a group on a regular basis. It keeps everyone’s ear to the beating developer’s heart of the company.
Lulz
The Lulz. Ah, the Lulz.
The Lulz section is the fun of Dev Roundup.
We link-dump cool projects we’ve discovered during the week, post insightful programming conference videos, list innumerable blog posts from thought leaders in various language communities.
It’s a forum for sharing too.
We share snippets of code, techniques forged in the heat of client projects, and idioms we’re eager to get feedback on. We perform informal code review trying to get to the golden nugget of shared knowledge that we can all benefit from. We debate alternatives and arrive at solutions.
We also share our passions: Raspberry Pi projects, weekend hackathon stories, functional programming insights, open source contributions, undocumented API internals…
We do it all in the name of the clients, the company, the team, and the Roundup.
What Do You Need?
We’ve assembled the following checklist of required materials to host your own Dev Roundup:
- Laptops + an internet connection (to access the aforementioned Doc)
- A way to share screens (we use Apple TV)
- Beer (or other beverage of choice)
- Devs
So Who Shows Up?
Well…the devs show up, of course.
Specifically, all devs in one office gather for a Roundup. We’ve found that it’s easier to have separate Roundups for offices in different timezones, rather than forcing everyone to adjust to one timezone’s “5pm on a Friday.”
Dev Roundup shouldn’t feel like just another meeting; it should be a wind-down session that lets everyone share, plan, learn, and enjoy the like-minded company of other devs. Forcing another team to huddle around a laptop at 8pm on a Friday goes against that goal.
Visiting Devs
Our Roundups always welcome visiting devs from our other offices. Besides being informative, Dev Roundup is a way to spread our culture — our philosophie, if you will — to all our teams.
Bad puns aside, we also welcome contractors and interns to join in Roundups. Having outside opinions and fresh content adds variety and allows us to know our contractors and interns better.
Select alumni are also extended a perpetual invitation. It’s always good to catch up and find what interesting projects past Philosophers have been working on after they’ve left the “team proper.”
Non-Devs
On occasion, a curious UX Designer or PM might pop in. Like anthropological researchers studying a foreign culture, they usually observe and jot notes about what we do in our native habitat — crack jokes about the latest JavaScript frontend framework, for example.
Realistically, we welcome non-developer members of the Philosophie staff to Roundups. It gives them a forum to address all the developers at once and it allows us to talk with them about issues that might affect all the developers.
Though they only show up occasionally, we always extend an invitation.
Sign Me Up!
Dev Roundup is a great way to keep a team in sync. It gives developers a chance to voice concerns, share opinions, and learn from one another. Its chief artifact, The Doc, provides both a valuable knowledge base for veteran devs and a cultural roadmap for new hires.
So next Friday evening, before you reach for your car keys, consider sticking around with your fellow devs for a good ol’ fashioned Dev Roundup. Your team will be better for it.
