Amsterdam, Netherlands - Work Retreat

This week, Beeper had our second meetup after being acquired by Automattic earlier this year. Unlike the last retreat in Porto which had lots of other Automattic employees in attendance, this was just our team and was focused on work and planning less than team-building.

Automattic is a remote-only company, so work retreats are the only time that we can connect with our co-workers in-person and build stronger personal relationships among the team. The best part is that we get to go to cool locations for these meetups. You can read about all the previous work retreats on this blog.

For this retreat, we returned to The Social Hub Amsterdam City which was one of the best retreat locations in my opinion. We had a co-working/conference room to ourselves.

Vision and Execution

During the first day of the retreat, Brad and Kishan talked about the technical and product visions for Beeper next year and beyond. At the highest level, our goal is to make the best chat app. To accomplish that, we need to build a lot more features to gain parity with the existing chat apps. We need to finish our transition to local bridges, we need to improve the reliability and speed of our backend infrastructure, make our clients faster and more native-feeling, and much more.

In order to execute our lofty goals, we have to work together effectively as a team. One of the team leads, Matt Wondra, led a discussion about working norms and expectations which was quite unifying as we all agreed on the overall expectations, and the only discussion points were tactical in nature.

Telegramming

The main thing I worked on was the Telegram bridge. I’ve been rewriting it in Go since the last retreat and we released the new bridge to all users a few weeks ago. However, there has unfortunately been a very long tail of bugs that have caused users to experience edge cases that we didn’t detect during our internal testing.

I took advantage of having Tulir right next to me to discuss and fix some of the most prevalent bugs, but there is still more work to do.

The Server’s on Fire

Over the last few months, the on-call rotation for the Platform team have been plagued by lots of unactionable and spurious alerts that have caused the team to get a real case of alert fatigue. In fact, we had quite a few alerts during the retreat itself. As we were travelling to dinner on one evening, an alert came through and Brad had to respond on his laptop in the Uber. I was also woken up overnight on Tuesday which was quite brutal as I was just starting to get a bit accustomed to the new timezone.

The Platform team had already planned to discuss strategies to reduce the alert burden, but the alerts during the retreat helped remind us why we wanted to do so! We discussed strategies to not only reduce the alert burden but also recommitted to prioritising investigating and mitigating persistent alerts. I’m excited that we are prioritising stability as that will become more and more necessary as we grow our userbase and as our infrastructure grows in complexity.

Localling All of the Bridges

As announced in our How Beeper Android Works blog post earlier this year, we are working to run bridges within the client. This was the impetus behind rewriting all of the bridges in Go using a common bridge framework so that we can integrate them into the clients.

During the retreat, there was lots of cross-team collaboration and testing to work out the interface details between bridges and clients. I was not involved in this, but it was neat to see all of the cross-team collaboration.

Rematch!

At the last Amsterdam retreat one of the highlights was playing pool with the team. We of course had to have a rematch. Tulir and Toni beat me and Nick twice! I guess we will have to return for yet another rematch!

Overall, this retreat was a productive and encouraging one. I’m excited about the plans we have for the future, and I am encouraged by how well the team works together. I was happy to get to work in-person with my team, and discuss how we are going to improve our oncall experience moving forward.