A month in the life of an Agiledrop developer

There’s no denying the fact that our developers are the key to Agiledrop’s success, and accordingly they make up the bulk of our team. It’s only natural, then, that we need to empower them and enable them to grow if we want to sustain this success.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at what a typical month looks like for a developer working at Agiledrop: what their daily and weekly tasks are, what fun activities we organize to keep each month diverse and exciting beyond new work challenges, and how we just generally maintain a pleasant office vibe where everyone is welcomed and accepted.

We kick each week off with a short weekly meeting, timed strategically to accommodate even those who are used to arriving later, whether that be due to calls with a client in the evening, or just due to it being Monday.

During the weekly (as we call it), we do an overview of the previous week’s work, then touch base on what the plans are for the current week, if anyone is on vacation, and if there are any new projects, clients or team members.

The first week of the month we also hold a longer monthly meeting, which again serves as an overview of the past month’s work, as well as any newly acquired projects and/or new hires.

More importantly, though, the monthly meetings are a chance to recognize and thank those employees who go the extra mile, either by working overtime to keep a project afloat, or by organizing or helping out at an event.

Finally, we also do an overview of all of the past month’s events, both in-house events as well as larger Drupal events that we attend or sponsor. The former are especially important to a great team spirit and hence to our team’s efficiency and productivity.

These in-house events vary from month to month, but generally try to follow a predefined course. Each month, we have at least 2 employee-centric events, which we typically hold on a Thursday, the same as the aforementioned monthly meeting.

The first one is the AgileTalk, where developers can present a topic they find interesting - and receive a hefty financial reward as encouragement for taking the time to share their knowledge and excitement with the rest of the team.

The second one alternates between the AgileSport and the AgileFood, which are both intended as a way to get the whole office together and spend some time without focusing exclusively on work.

In addition to that, we also support the Slovenian developer community by hosting PHP meetups and other events. This year, we’ve hosted two of these in collaboration with the Slovenian PHP community; and our developer Peter Kokot, one of the release managers of PHP 7.4 which was released just yesterday, was actually one of the speakers at one of them.

But, of course, the bulk of our time at the office is dedicated to working on our projects. We spend our days coding and also helping each other out, with lengthy discussions pervading our development channel on Slack.

This collaboration is also the reason why we work predominantly in the offices - it’s much easier to share knowledge and help someone out with a particularly challenging task if you’re there physically.

And it’s something every developer participates in, freshly acquired juniors and veteran engineers alike; our strong company culture enables us to accept and appreciate any kind of input, without viewing it as an attempt of undermining someone.

Because we’re frequently in contact with our clients and their own dev teams, we have soundproof booths and several conference rooms in each of our offices, which allows us to accommodate several developers having calls at the same time.

In the case of a client with a large time zone difference, and consequently less convenient hours for calls, our developers can finish work early and then do the call from home, which allows them to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Conclusion

A month in the life of a developer at Agiledrop contains a healthy mix of challenges and team activities. Since employee experience is critical to business success, we strive to make their day-to-day as pleasant as possible and give them abundant opportunities for growth.

While it’s largely the same as a typical month at most development agencies, we believe our unique set of activities definitely spices things up and helps boost team spirit and forge new friendships.

Besides these activities, different offices also have different perks - the Maribor team often face off in table football, for example, while our team in Ljubljana can quench our nostalgia by playing some legendary arcade games on our RetroPie.

All of this adds up to each month spent working on interesting and challenging projects, constantly learning and growing, and, most importantly, hanging out and developing new ideas with amazing people.