JAMming in Palermo: Devs vs Sicily

Much of the Q3 this year we’ve spent on strengthening the core of our dev team and improving our project management processes. Between these tasks and onboarding new clients, we needed a break.

We needed another retreat.

As many of you already know we are a full remote web dev shop focused on helping agencies and companies with serverless web, headless CMSs, static site generators, and Jamstack tools. Though we’ve talked about it in our JAMming in Malaga post already, I’m emphasizing the full remote aspect of our work here to quickly sum up what retreats mean for us as a company:

• We get to know the team well, see what colleagues are good at, discover/show hidden skills and hidden talents, create friendships with people we don’t usually work with (in projects) and get to know them on a more personal level.
• We get a unique opportunity to talk about serious stuff in less serious circumstances.
• We get to improve communication across the team.
• We get to improve the teams’ morale and team spirit.
• We get to learn new things in our workshops.

Now I’ve set our goals, let me tell you a story with a couple of pictures of how we conquered Sicily.

Destination

The strategic location of Sicily at the center of the Mediterranean has made the island a busy crossroads of history. Greeks and Phoenicians were there. It has been under Roman, Byzantine, and Arab rule. At one time it was a kingdom and a center of revolution at another. Don’t get me started with the mafia stories. Rich history made it into a cultural melting pot that it is today and you can see it all over the island and especially in Palermo.

Sicily pretty much withstood everything that the history trowed at it making it an obvious choice for a couple of Jamstackers to visit it. Not that we planned on conquering it. With its lavish history, it was a perfect place for a multi-cultural team to soak up the different cultures and the beauty of the place and, why not, applied it to our company values. Oh, and the food & wine, and the sun, and the warm sea certainly helped.

The Team

Unlike last time we were a couple of members short. Those were the casualties of remote work. But we kept on with our traditional new members’ beach talks and got to know the latest dev in our team Bruno from Brasil and project manager superstar Ralph.

The Talks

But it wasn’t all fun and games. Our newly appointed project manager Ralph talked about project management and steps we’ll be taking in making devs workflow and client support much easier than before. We also talked about the power of the employer and employee branding. The differences, what they mean for our company, our brand and ultimately what they mean for the employees personally.

Finally, our CEO Denis shared a glimpse at Bejamas plans for 2020.

Hard at work, hard at play

In Malaga, the previous retreat location, we had a strict agenda. This time we opted out for a bit relaxed atmosphere with short brainstorming sessions for new company strategies (this translates to evening terrace roundtable-over-wine/beer discussions).

The following months will show how good those were.

Have you checked our careers page? Not for the performance scores but for the open positions 😲 We really could use some help to make our retreats even better.