MARIMORE Engineering Team Camp in Malacca

Because all of us work remotely all the time and we usually only communicate via voice, video and/or text, it is great to meetup and discuss targets, issues and ideas face-to-face.

Early September 2014 we had a 2-day team camp for our engineering team in Malacca.

Because all of us work remotely all the time and we usually only communicate via voice, video and/or text, it is great to meetup and discuss targets, issues and ideas face-to-face.

Meetups are a great way to communicate issues or ideas which are complicated to be put to paper. I find that discussing ideas are much more effective face-to-face; Perhaps due to the many tools (like pen and paper) expressions (nuances in the facial expression, hand movements and voice) that we can utilize and the real-time nature of the discussion.

At the same time the beauty of working remotely all the time is that it trains you to be precise and concise as much as possible but without leaving too much information out to get your point across. Usually we only have one shot to communicate (i.e sending an email or a text message) which if we miss to get the point across, will require the reader to get our subsequent explaination in her next iteration, and this will require us to wait.

Team camp started at 10AM on the first day, and since everyone was driving to the hotel, we met up at the 12th floor executive check-in lounge.

It was our first time having our team camp at Hatten Hotel, but we were very happy with the service. Since we had the executive rooms, we were able to take advantage of the executive lounge with it's free flow of coffee and juice, with some light snacks around 4PM in the afternoon.

The hotel WiFi was also available and pretty fast, although it was a bit flaky at times. Each of us has a YES 4G Huddle, so we managed to get connected (coverage wasn't an issue since Hatten is in the middle of the town) when the hotel WiFi was difficult to connect.

Food wasn't an issue: There were many small eateries across the street in the Dataran Pahlawan mall, and for breakfast Hatten had a breakfast plan included with our reservation and the spread was impressive.

The team camp this time focused more on FullCourt, the Cloud Communications platform we acquired last July. Discussion focused on the current status of development, functionalities, issues faced and also an overview of the roadmap that we have planned for all of our cloud services.

This meetup was also to congratulate and welcome Aman, the new addition to our team. Aman in mainly responsible for the technology transfer of FullCourt from the current FullCourt team.

The engineering team

We continued our discussion in the morning of the 2nd day, and we ended the team camp by lunch time since we wanted everyone to be home by dinner.

MARIMORE tries to do team camps a few times a year, and this time it was the first time we had it in Malacca. I was pretty happy with the experience, and will put Malacca high on top of our list.