Future of tomorrow

What's definitely part of our Cali culture? An annual teambuilding weekend. We went to the cosy Ardennes together with all our colleagues. Our happiness team rolled up its sleeves and prepared everything as well as possible to organise the most epic weekend with the theme: Future of tomorrow.

Our team includes a range of different profiles. A weekend like this, where we finally bring all our colleagues together from Kortrijk, Leuven, Ghent and Kontich, is therefore the perfect time to share extensive knowledge with each other. Some of the workshops on offer included:

1. How do we tackle our projects?

One of our Digital Producers, Jonas, gave a workshop with guidelines on project operation and its alignment between our different competence centres. The workshop was focused on the division of roles within a project, the correct creation and interpretation of a product backlog and Jonas also shared best practices about time tracking.

2. PHP Machine Learning

Backend developer Ward talked about machine learning and artificial intelligence. He explained these concepts as accessible as possible to the whole group. Using real-life examples, he showed how these technologies are already currently being used by companies such as Netflix. To conclude, he gave a simple practical example using a php package called RubixML, showing that ML and AI do not have to be complex.

3. The Drupal website of VDAB

Colleague Wannes then shared knowledge and insights about one of the largest, most visited Drupal websites in Belgium: vdab.be. He talked about our technical approach and way of working, the automatic test strategies and other novelties we are working on. There are many lessons to be learned from a project like VDAB that can be mirrored in all of Calibrate's projects. This kind of knowledge sharing is important to grow as developers and as a company.

4. Gitlab

For our colleagues at Codana, Gitlab is the tool they use for code hosting and also CI pipelines. Joris talks about next year's ambitions. Codana is namely aiming for automatic builds that can save precious time for deployments. Thus, during this teambuilding weekend, we also ensure knowledge sharing between Codana and Calibrate.

5. Drupal and the Federal Police

Some developers gave a presentation on their consultancy assignment at the Federal Police of Belgium. They spoke passionately about the origins and evolution of their assignment and what their day-to-day activities look like. Moreover, Kris and Michael also shared some fun elements with their colleagues to inspire them.

6. Drupal Recipes

Drupal Distributions and Recipes is one of the strategic initiatives that the Drupal community has been pushing hard recently. Drupal Recipes is a promising replacement for the installation profile/starter kit. During our weekend, Joris gave us an overview of where the Drupal community is heading, where they're already today and he gave his colleagues a view on... The Future of Tomorrow.

You know what they say, knowledge is to the brain what food is to the stomach. We ended our sessions with catering from A Point and to completely blow off steam, we took the Delorian back to the eighties for a back to the future party!

On Saturday, we got to choose between two adventure activities. One group of colleagues chose the underground mines and the other the altitude courses!