mathieu

How time flies! Mathieu De Meue agrees immediately in his personal account. Meanwhile, this Drupal Developer has been working with us for a year. Read all about his first year at Calibrate below, where he talks about our on-boarding, buddies and afterworks.

A retrospective

I'm going to start this post with the following phrase: "Wooooow time flies!". Because yes say, on September 20, 2022, I will have been employed at Calibrate for one year. And whether it has been an exciting journey? Yes, be sure of that! So I would like to list a few things that have stayed with me the most, besides the work of course because that is the most important thing. I myself have a love for everything open source, and with this you are in the right place in the Drupal world. So I love to contribute everything I learn to the Drupal community in the many modules and such.

Guidance

Thing is, I barely had any PHP classes or even Drupal classes in my education. The training I took was mostly focused on everything around Javascript. But during my internship, I chose to get a taste of Drupal anyway. I liked it so much that I stuck with it, and now one year later I still enjoy working with it and learn new things every day as a junior developer. The support at Calibrate is excellent and they really actively search and think along with me about what you need to advance in your career path as a junior developer. For example, I had several buddies throughout my first year, because Calibrate works with a buddy system. When you start, a senior developer is assigned to you and he or she shows you the ropes in the wonderful world of Drupal. I had different buddies depending on the projects I was working on, and I learned a lot from these colleagues.

Happiness at work

In addition to work at Calibrate, there is also time for relaxation and team building among colleagues. For example, we also have a "Happiness team." These colleagues ensure that relaxation is also provided before, during or after the working day.

You may now be thinking, "What do you mean before, during and after the working day?" but yes! Let me list several initiatives that this team has created that make the workday a lot more fun. For example, there is an occasional breakfast at work, this is often organized on a "Back to work" occasion such as after summer leave, after a period of working from home by Covid, ... . Then we gather with all colleagues in the different offices to enjoy a delicious and extensive breakfast together.

There are also regular "afterworks". Some examples are going for a drink after the working day, a boardgames evening at the office where we sometimes work together but sometimes compete against each other, a lan-party where we put our best foot forward in different video games, but it can also be an activity outside the office walls such as an evening of jumping in the Jumpsky bouncy castle park, an evening of city golf or going to a summer bar together during the summer season.

The highlight in terms of activities is of course the annual Calibrate weekend in the Ardennes where we move to a vacation home together with all of our colleagues for a day of sessions from the different industries. Besides the sessions, there is also time for fun, hiking, having a drink together and just conviviality in general. You simply can't have worked at Calibrate and not been along for the weekend once!

mathieu

Drupal & Open Source

Since we are a Drupal company, we also place great importance on the community. This is reflected at Calibrate in various initiatives. For example, I was lucky enough to experience a community event in my first year as a Drupal developer. For example, in April 2022 it was the Drupal Dev Days in Ghent. Here we were present with a whole delegation including a Calibrate booth, but also to follow the sessions, contribute in the sprint rooms and just make connections within the Drupal community. In addition, on Saturday, September 3, 2022, there was a "Calibrate Contribution Day" for the first time here we and several colleagues open sourced a few of our internal modules to contribute to the Drupal community. The day started with a session by senior Developer Stef who told us more about exactly how to contribute on a Drupal project. After that we all started working on one or more modules to bring them out on drupal.org and the junior developers were able to learn a lot from the senior developers.

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