Team building brainstorming

11 Feb 2021

Intro

extract of Marissa Goldberg tweet:

I love remote work but I miss the serendipitous moments in the office when I caught up with a coworker while getting coffee and had a breakthrough.

Serendipitous moments are ones that happen by chance.

That coffee break moment happened due to structure. You're working in the same physical office as your coworker and have the same work schedule. This structure is what brought the two of you together.

This is important to recognize because you'll need to create some structure in order to introduce breakthrough moments into remote life.

Main ideas:

• good relationships and team spirit does not happen by chance
• need to put some energy to create or maintain that
  • test some new ideas
  • drop what doesn't feet our needs
  • etc.

What it doesn't mean

• we have to force ourselves to attend meetings, share informal time, etc.
• everyone has to participate to each event/meeting/idea

---

Time to brainstorm!

Part 1: for what?

Start with the for what/why question (not what or how).

It's important to define and share what is our vision of the team, to define ourself.
Then, talk about what could be done to reach it (quick wins, mid-long term actions, etc.)

• One way to try to approach this question is by answering "what do you like about QS" and then collect people's point of views. The team vision is the collective of views of its participants.

Part 2: what

Once we have an idea on what we like we might start trying to think on solutions to what could we do to reinforce and build things on the path we invision.

• "random" text chat room on gitter (so we can talk about less related to work subjects? that might be helpful to find out about people's personalities and make stuff like talking in the coffee room more natural)
• chat room on discord. besides being more informal it has this gaming aspect to it, maybe we could play games together in there?
• maybe we could explore the vr world together. a friend said she did a team meeting here and it was pretty cool

Notes from the meeting

• What we like at QS?

Adrien

• talk about code/tech (low level stuff, performant code, etc. even if I still have a lot to learn), solving problems in general
• playing/trying things like on a raspberry pi, etc.
• physical modeling/engineering
• gardening, DIY (do it yourself) at home (spending a loooot of time, nature, hiking (not too hard :p), biking, swimming, just being at contryside
• board games, read books (heroic fantasy), listening music
• cooking
• friends and family times :)

Mariana:

• Tech stuff: rust!, machine learning and deep learning. I'm interested in security stuff(but dk anything). (I also like low lvl stuff and reverse engineering things). it's cool that we're completely remote workers. I like compilers now, maybe I'll do a masters on it
• Non tech stuff: drawing (I can make tattoos!), Photography (I just think it's cool, dk anything about it), I play the guitar badly(we should start a QS band), I also write bad poems. I also enjoy nature a lot an think gardening is super cool, but I only have potted plants in berlin :( but I have a lot of them. I used to play games a lot, not anymore. Sometimes I still play boardgames

Johan:

• Tech stuff: C++, typescript, software architecture, maths, middleware
• Music: I have studied classical piano for 15 years, and learnt the Guitar (by myself). Favorite kinds of music are classical music, metal, rock, psychedelic music.
• Cooking
• Salsa
• Trekking
• Heroic Fantasy
• Role Playing Game (Call of Cthulhu, D&D)
• I used to play video games a lot

Martin:

• Graphics-related stuffs (OpenGL/WebGL/ThreeJS/SFML) whether it's 2D or 3D. I like to display stuffs on the screen.
• Into photography a bit.
• Love taking bag and tent and go into the wild
• Love every kind of music but don't play anything
• Play video-games a lot, sometimes too much, would like to make my own at some point
• Used to do charcoal drawing, but I stopped. Used to dance, but I stopped.

Madhur:
(Factual Absolutist, Moral Relativist, Rational Optimist, Physical Localist, Digital Globalist)

• Tech Stuff: Like Big Data things but have only scratched the surface with Apache Spark / Storm / GraphX once. Proficient in ML / DL / Data Science / RL [numpy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn, PyTorch] but not really into heavy DL / RL. Never tried but want to explore systems (cryptography, distributed systems, compilers, large scale parallel stuff, etc.). Also want to understand the magic of WASM but seems like hard entry for a novice. Worked a lot in Java too but Pythonista at heart.
• Non-Tech Stuff: Recently started lifting and hitting the gym (losing 18 kgs) and seem to like it. Very much into Entrepreneurship / Products. Pro Innovation and like new bold Ideas. Care more about facts than morals. Want to explore adventure activities (surfing, skiing, skateboarding, horse-riding, etc.) in near future. Also like to learn about finance in free time. Occasional reading on what's happening in startups, venture capital space by reading books, listening to podcasts, etc.

Wolf:

• like markdown, technical things, changing the world, big ideas, products (!)
• Want to have more clones to execute the rest of the ideas in my head:
  • Rethinking the Notebook (current jupyter notebook is old now)
  • Implementing a new Language that is strict like C++ and cool like Python (and has the same syntax as Python)
  • Finalizing the Constraint solver, and adding it to Inkscape
  • Implementing the JIT for xtensor / C++
  • In general, I think, all programming languages should have a compiled and an interpreted mode
  • I want to work on classes / data structures that transcend the boundaries of programming languages (e.g. Point[2] should be implented in Python and just work in C++)
  • The notebook can only (really) execute code in one language, but it would be interesting if we could mix programming languages and data structures from different languages (maybe shared through JSON, or another serialization format) (IKR! :D mariana edit)
• besides, biking, hate fishing, dislike whereby (too much CPU usage), Bluetooth also sucks often, like running, hiking (we should do a QS trip in the alps), like PinePhone, GNOME

Sylvain:

• I like when a simple elegant idea has real-world impact.

• I like craftmanship. Frustrated to not build physical

• Besides

• teaching maths.
• dancing! used to be crazy about going out with many kinds of couple dance (kinda stopped practicing a 4-5 years ago)

tags: team