The following article was written about an experience I had within my work at Mercedes-Benz.io.

How our software engineers exchange ideas and have fun

With the Covid-19 pandemic a lot has changed in our lives and when it comes to working at Mercedes-Benz.io we have adopted a flexible model.

This allows more freedom, better work-life balance, and so much more. However, there can be fewer positives (as with anything in life, right?). With remote, it has been more difficult to know our fellow MB.ioneers on a deeper level. It made me miss the face-to-face interaction and collaboration. I think nothing beats getting everyone together.

So, in the backend circle, we just went for it and organized an offsite with the goals to exchange knowledge and experience, get to know one another, and connecting.

What better place to do it than Nazaré, the capital of the biggest waves in the world (well, don´t get spooked by it, there are also calm waves to enjoy a beach day 😎), a place where Garrett McNamara in 2011 set, at the time, a world record on the biggest wave surfed and, home of the Mercedes-EQ Lounge.

Why the Mercedes-EQ Lounge?

The Mercedes-EQ Lounge is a place for debate, conversation, and experience.

As you might have heard Mercedes-Benz is committed to a sustainable future and the Lounge is a perfect example of that.

The Mercedes-EQ Lounge is a 100% sustainable place, designed using recycled and reused materials. It includes an electric circuit that comes from the reuse of four battery modules from one of the first units of the 100% electric Mercedes-Benz B-Class. The modules now store the energy captured by photovoltaic panels and power the whole building. The Lounge additionally has four charging stations for electric cars.

So, to us, it is a match made in heaven.

If you want to know more about the Lounge, read here (post in Portuguese).

The event

We gathered in our Lisbon office and set course to Nazaré. Lucky us, we were able to get our hands on two Mercedes-Benz EQV for our travel.

During the morning at the hotel, we had our “Product Roulette” in which everyone presented not only themselves but also their product teams: who was part of the team and stakeholder; what is the product and its purpose and how does the product work (tech stack and the business concerns it tackles).

Did I mention the activities? Does a high-speed voyage, drifting in the water and doing water-force defying maneuvers sound exciting?
How about the opportunity to go by boat to the Nazaré Canyon and hear how those giant waves are formed? We had the opportunity to do all of it. Beyond that we drove some 4x4 buggies at high speed through the dunes and even used a giant board for group Stand Up Paddle.

Well, this would not be an offsite without some cool activities. All powered by Mercedes-EQ Lounge together with Nazaré Water Fun. It was an afternoon packed with water, sand, fun and adventure.

After dinner, we enjoyed a walk by the beach for a fruitful chance to not focus on work but get to know our colleagues.

The following day, we surfed the knowledge sharing wave. We went to the Lounge for our well-known Exchange.io format where everyone can casually share knowledge or just open a discussion on certain topics. It could be a training to introduce a new framework, technique, or any other topic which is interesting for us. We do this regularly at the Backend circle together with the Architecture and Technology circle.

For this session we had a wide array of topics:

• a colleague presenting an internal marketplace to share ideas and find collaborators for projects, that can be suitable in an Inner Sourcing approach;
• a team that designed and implemented a custom alerting system that alerts when their tenants have misconfigured settings which leads them to reduce a lot of errors;
• a team that shared their lessons learned about Reactive Programming with Spring WebFlux and Kotlin Coroutines;
• an HTTP library for Common Backends that aims to address common concerns across all our product and re-use code;
• Finally, a lot of debate and brainstorming on cross-cutting topics and issues in our current software landscape and how we want to address them.

With our Backend Offsite we were able to do a lot.
Firstly, the opportunity to take a unique test drive, in a spacious, comfortable, quiet and with excellent autonomy Mercedes EQV. Secondly, to visit the amazing town of Nazaré. Thirdly, to get to know the Mercedes-EQ Lounge and feel its purpose. In the same way Mercedes-EQ was designed with reusable materials, we ourselves took our learning of our common technical issues in order to re-utilize solutions across our teams.
Finally, all of us, got to know one another better.

We look forward to having another event like this…

Thank you for reading! 😃

GitHub: https://github.com/gonmmarques
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goncalommarques/
Credits to my dear colleague António Ribeiro for the pictures 📸.

Originally posted on Mercedes-Benz.io blog.