Our Traditions as a Company
As you might have noticed, we’re in the process of republishing stories from the old inaka blog that was taken down recently. I would like to use this entry to republish 3 of our oldest ones. But I won’t just straight up copy&paste them since a big chunk of their text doesn’t make that much sense now.
What I think it’s important to notice is how these things grew organically, perdured over time and defined our culture, that culture that we’re still very proud of. The three entries were:
- Inaka Friday Lunches (from November 2012)
- Inaka:Pong — DIY Sport (from December 2012)
- Friday Talks at Inaka (from December 2013)
So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the somewhat original descriptions of three of the most well-preserved traditions in Inaka history…
Inaka Friday Lunches
One way we like to get to know each other is by doing Friday Lunches: Every Friday, we all get together around a big table (or several tables) to enjoy a shared lunch followed by some group activities like lightning talks or introductions (more on that below).
When we first started we were just 5 and we took turns having each person cook. This quickly became onerous, as the numbers went up and the group of people who like to cook for 10, then 15, then 20, then 25 went down.
But we also found that catering services are incredibly inconsistent, or the portions are small. Chad DePue spent a lot of time agonizing about how to fix this because he believed sharing a meal together was important.
Finally, though, we found a solution. We hired Bethany Taylor to take over our administration tasks here in Buenos Aires. Bethany liked to cook and had a small catering business on the side so it worked out wonderfully for everyone. The date when Chad Grills wrote the original article, we had homemade pork sandwiches, hummus, and cookies. Delicious, and problem solved!
Notes from 2018
Bethany liked cooking so much that she eventually left Inaka to pursue a career as a chef!
Nevertheless, the tradition of eating together on Friday persisted until the very last day of the company which was, incidentally, a Friday… and we all ate together one last time.
The introductions I mentioned earlier were meant to allow everyone to know each other and to encourage newcomers to integrate more easily with the group. This particular tradition is still alive today since it became now the main part of the process to join our community.
Friday Talks at Inaka
At the time of writing the original article, we had just launched a series of talks to accompany our Friday lunches, and we were excited about it! Every week, one of our very own will volunteer to present something to the rest of us. We had given talks like this before, but we hoped for this tradition to become a more regular occurrence; as it stood back then, we were pulling to make it a weekly event. This was our schedule back then:
- Sumo DB by Marcelo Gornstein
- A Better Freckle by Hernán Rivas Acosta
- Testing iOS Clients by Pablo Villar
- Tsung! by iraunkortasuna
- Everybody is Kung Fu Testing by Ignacio Mendizabal
We planned to cover some of these talks on our blog after they were presented each Friday…
Notes from 2018
…and boy! oh, boy! We did! Many of our greatest blog posts were introduced in Friday lightning talks. But that was not all.
By far, the main benefit of these talks was to prepare folks for public speaking. For many of us, our first experience talking to some audience was a Friday after lunch speaking about the things we loved in front of a bunch of (sometimes overly excited, sometimes totally drowned in food) crazy fellows. And it was amazing! It built in us the confidence that allowed us then to go and speak at so many conferences and even give lectures on universities…
And that stuff is something we still do today, a year after the company was dissolved. Now, we even started organizing our own events!
Inaka:Pong — DIY Sport
One of the best things about working at Inaka was the freedom we had to be creative not only in the projects we worked on but also in the ways we worked and interacted with each other. An example of that was our fancy way of spending time at the office: Inaka:Pong.
Background Story and Materials
Not so long ago at Inaka, we had some spare time, or as described by xkcd…
We also had a couple of anti-stress balls retrieved from the conferences we attended…
An empty table, that happened to have two equally sized panels…
An unused glass panel…
And a lot of creative minds…
The Stadium
One day we decided to attach the glass to the wall, right over the empty table where the ball was just hanging around. And just like that, the Inaka Wimblepong Main Court was born…
It didn’t take long until Diego Samper and Ignacio Mendizabal started bouncing the ball against the glass and back into the table. A couple of casual games after that, the first set of rules for our newly created sport were laid out, and with them came a name for it: Inaka:Pong.
The Game
The sport was evolving quickly but the core of the game was to hit the ball with your hands to make it bounce against the glass so that it bounces back on the table. If it hits any surface before your opponent can reach it, you win the point and you serve the next one. The player that first reached 21 points won.
It was a fast-paced game with short, action-filled matches, though good ones lasted a little bit more than a full compile and test run for a big system ;) These qualities, among others, helped it become a very popular game and a good reason to miss the office when you worked from home.
We started playing it three months before writing the original article and by that time we already had a ranking (with very well thought punctuation rules), a wiki, a website under construction, several different game modes (i.e. you could play singles, doubles or last-man-standing) and, thanks to our design wizard Germán Azcona, a logo…
Notes from 2018
This tradition sadly didn’t last until the last the of the company, since (and I’m not joking here) a year after we started playing, our neighbors came to the office and complained about the noise. Why did they wait a full year? Well… they thought our office was under construction.
We eventually replaced Inaka:Pong with a regular ping-pong table, but we never stopped playing!
