Last Friday, seven guys from Pingdom’s Serbian development team came to visit us here in Sweden. What followed were four intensive days with a lot of work but also a lot of fun. Some of us hadn’t met before, so it was great getting to know everyone in person.
What was on the agenda?
- Plan the coming 12 months
- Discuss and specify coming features.
- And last but not least: have FUN. 🙂
In between meetings and planning sessions, we managed to sneak in some sightseeing in Stockholm, go-cart racing (Nenad, who has worked on Pingdom Tools, turned out be a total speed freak and won easily), a boat trip, a visit to an amusement park (if you see a ride called “The Catapult”, getting on it may not be the smartest idea, but we did anyway…), visits to night clubs, and a whole lot more.
Food statistics
Coffee, Coke and Red Bull were high in demand, and we had enough hamburgers and pizzas to feed a small country (how much can 10 people eat, anyway?).
I wasn’t all junk food, though. We had a great barbecue evening that also included some traditional Swedish-style crayfish eating (this created some initial confusion among our Serbian friends, but after a while they got the hang of it).
Above: Crayfish party before the barbecue. The hats come with the territory…
What did we get out of this?
Our Serbian and Swedish teams communicate on a daily basis, but nothing beats meeting face to face. We really believe that this has helped our two teams to bond even more, and as we already mentioned, it was a lot of fun (which should never be underestimated).
We have a solid plan for the next 12 months and for how to get where we want to be. The plan will probably be modified a bit along the way (we like being flexible) but when you are aiming to become the best uptime monitoring company in the world, you need to have a roadmap.
Pingdom is marching on ahead, and we have a great team of talented individuals who will help us get there. You will be seeing a LOT more from us in the future.
Above: Brief pause during one of our planning sessions.
How do you, our customer, benefit from this?
You will get a whole bunch of really cool and useful features on top of the ones we already have.
We have seven developers who are working full time with Pingdom. If you think we are delivering a good service now, you are going to be blown away during the coming 12 months.