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Our Response Might Be Delayed... We're on Retreat!

· Posted by Peldi in Company and tagged · 5 Comments

Hello friends!

I am super-excited as I type this. I am alone in the office today because it's an Italian holiday, a French holiday, and OUR WHOLE US TEAM IS ON ITS WAY TO ITALY! ๐Ÿ™‚

You see, tomorrow is the start of the 2nd annual Balsamiq Retreat!

The retreat is our once-a-year gathering so that we can spend some time together IN PERSON, IRL!!!! ๐Ÿ™‚

Last year, together with our families, we all went to a villa near lake Como, which was awesome.

This year we're going to a different villa, this time in the gorgeous Marche region.

Since the house is smaller than last year and we have more employees, this year it will only be full-time-employees, without families.

We have a lot of fun activities planned (mainly around food) - I can't share them yet because they're a surprise. I had my friend Amy at Divino Tours help me organize some very special events, I can't wait!

We also plan on working though, we have a lot to do. The theme of this retreat is think things through.

We collected a list of topics to brainstorm about: my goal is to hash things out for some thorny topics, breaking them down into actionable, detailed step-by-step TODO lists, so that we can then intermix them all together with our roadmap for the next few months of work. Fun!

Here's a few of the topics, straight from our intranet. Some are big topics that will take hours to think through, others will be easy enough to discuss over lunch. Some are technical, others are about our internal processes, all of them are important to us right now.

  • all new photos for the website / avatars
  • do a release together so that everyone can see what it's like
  • discuss employee donation policy
  • discuss icons
  • explore skin implementation ideas
  • discuss optimistic / pessimistic locking
  • tone down notifications from Tweetdeck / Skype
  • do a review of gmail filters
  • software quality workshop / summit
  • adding triangle to geometric shape
  • organization name vs your full name
  • discuss fogbugz renewals
  • discuss removing free desktop from plugins
  • set up online store (t-shirts etc)
  • discuss possible migration to fastspring
  • discuss BofA account options/changes
  • discuss discount codes: Russ and Students (other?)
  • discuss automating maintenance emails
  • discuss blogging
  • talk about "5 whys"

We might blog or tweet about our different activities, or we might just enjoy them fully instead and not worry about it. ๐Ÿ™‚

So if we're a little slow in responding to email and phone calls next week, now you know why! ๐Ÿ™‚

We should all be back to "real" work by Monday, June 13th.

Onward!

P.S. Special thanks to our families for taking care of our children etc. while we're gone. We love you!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (5)

  1. Love the list of task to be acomplished!!! Enjoy and post some photos asap!

  2. Wow… I’m jealous! Great for you guys! the product rocks! and anyone needs a rest huh? Can I give you my manager’s contact number so you can suggest “one of these” for our next Developers get together??? ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. This is awesome ๐Ÿ™‚ Hey, why not come to Berlin next year ๐Ÿ˜‰ …

  4. Marche region is a good choice. Please, give me a shout if you stop by Porto San Giorgio!
    I’d be happy to show you around and suggest from Michelin rated restaurants to very local trattorie. Fish, of course!

  5. I admire this on so many levels.