Transloadit team meetup: Amsterdam edition

We usually reserve this space to keep you informed about our technical progress, but today we would like to break with that trend for a bit and give you some insight into what is happening on the people side of things here at Transloadit.

Transloadit employs people from around the globe. For one thing, this means that we do not have an office where we can see each other every day. We talk a lot on Slack of course, but that is not the same. For this reason, we make sure to get together at least once a year, to get to know each other better and also to have the opportunity to work together in a more traditional office setting.

We had our latest meetup in the weekend of February 27-28 and we would like to take you through the events.

‘With our powers combined!’ – Assembling the team

On Friday, planes carrying the international members of Transloadit began to arrive at Schiphol airport. Marius, Tim and Harry, as well as any friends and family accompanying them, settled into their hotels in Amsterdam. Regrettably, Artur was not able to join us this time around, but – as you shall soon see – we managed to find a way to have him present in more than spirit alone.

At 10 AM on Saturday, the core of the Transloadit team kicked things off with a nice and healthy breakfast on the top floor of the Volkshotel, preparing for a fun, work free day. It was great to see everyone in person again – some even for the first time – and we were poised to show them a great (PG-rated) time in Amsterdam.

Geeks will be geeks, you know. So what better way to please a bunch of programmers than to spend the rest of the morning playing video games. Our thoughts exactly! Not wasting any more time, we headed for the nearest arcade, where things got remarkably competitive and we may have inadvertently started some kind of Dance Dance Revolution. After a few hours of fun and games, we took the team to enjoy what used to be a Turkish dish, but can now certainly be considered a staple of Dutch cuisine: Döner Kebab!

Tim and Marius doing what they do best: passing things off to each other

Justin, Harry’s friend from the US, explaining to Harry and Tim how Transloadit could be better at managing time sensitive projects.

After lunch, it was time to put our teamworking skills to the test. We did so in one of the great escape room experiences that Amsterdam has to offer: Escape Through Time. We don’t want to spoil too much for those of you who might also want to experience this escape room adventure, run by the guys and girls from Boom Chicago. Suffice it to say that we found ourselves in an alternate reality where time travel was possible and we had to travel between the present day and 1944, to stop the Germans from winning the war. Ironically, if it weren’t for Marius – one of our German based programmers – taking a calm and collected approach amidst our panicked yelling, things might have turned out very differently and we would probably have ended up eating in a restaurant on Merkel Street that day.

After casually saving the city from the Nazis, we decided it had been enough excitement for the day. It was high time for some beers and to satisfy this desire, we went to the Amsterdam city brewery Brouwerij ‘t IJ. There, we were joined by the rest of the members of Transloadit and any family members who had spent the day elsewhere, such as Saar, Kevin’s daughter and patron lady of Transloadit. After a few hours of delicious specialty beers, we were kicked out when the place closed.

From left to right: Fahad, Erwin, Marius, Tim, Artur’s severed paper head on an electronic flyswatter, Kevin, A.J., and Harry

Beer makes you hungry and Brouwerij ‘t IJ beer also makes you thirsty for more Brouwerij ‘t IJ beer. Therefore, we looked for a place that offered both food and Brouwerij ‘t IJ beers. This did not take long. We enjoyed some great burgers and fries, as well as huge platters full of nachos drowned in cheddar cheese. More beers were sacrificed to the gods of coding, who didn’t seem to mind at all that the occasional water or soda was ordered as well. It was a great end to a great day.

A nice meal to conclude an exciting day. And yes, that is a window looking out onto an illuminated space under a staircase. Who said art is dead in Amsterdam?

“Work, work, work, work, work” – Rihanna 2016

‘All work and no play’ certainly rings as true as ever, but the other way around is no good either. That is why we assembled the core of the team on Sunday for a day of working, for once not separated by many miles of land and an Atlantic Ocean. After breakfast, we took the boat to A LAB, the co-working space that Kevin frequents, which is situated in an old Shell laboratory. We were excited to give everyone a taste of Amsterdam’s best coffee, served by the Coffee Virus. Excitement soon turned into disappointment when we found out that you could contract the coffee virus on any day of the week – except on Sunday.

Sunday morning breakfast overlooking the city, in presence of our patron lady. Can you spot who, apart from her, was alcohol free last night?

The happiness of Harry consists of not being forced to work on a Sunday with a hangover, while being smirked at by a paper Artur

Even though most of the team was quite jealous of the one who had restricted himself to water and soda on the night before, we actually got a lot of work done. Tim and Marius worked on integrating tus.io into Transloadit. Harry, Kevin and Artur (remotely) worked on the Modal interface of uppy.io. Both ambitious open source projects that you'll certainly hear more about.

With a full day’s work behind us, we headed for a restaurant called Tibet to end the day - and an awesome weekend – on a full stomach. The next day, people would begin their travels home again. Except for Harry and Justin, who traveled onwards to conquer Europe, where they were left distinctly unimpressed by Venice. Barbarians.

Rice, rice, baby

Introducing the newest members of our team

Apart from the reasons mentioned above, we also really wanted to set up this get-together because we have recently expanded our team with a few new members. Even better a reason to meet each other in person.

We would like to introduce them to you as well:

Artur

Artur is a web developer, who enjoys having a good meal out on his balcony or at a park. He likes to experiment with growing food and is often working on his home automation robot, which also serves as a playground for picking up new technologies such as React. Artur is a traveler at heart and regularly writes about his adventures. He is a coffee aficionado and runs an occasional pop-up coffee shop that you might enjoy. For Transloadit, Artur is primarily working on Uppy, our next generation open source file uploader for web browsers.

Harry

Harry is an exceptional front-end developer with a keen eye for design, who operates on the cutting edge of web development. Harry has a fascination for computer graphics, live installations and house music. In his free time, he is learning to play the piano and mastering the art of music production. Harry co-authored the "Server Rendering" recipe in the official Redux docs. He is also one of the three developers behind Twitter Flight School. For Transloadit, Harry is primarily working on Uppy, our next generation open source file uploader for web browsers.

A.J.

A.J. obtained a Master’s degree cum laude in Ancient History from Leiden University, specializing in Ancient Egyptian Criminal Law. He has a great love for languages – ancient and modern alike – and has bilingual proficiency in Dutch and English. A.J. currently works as a freelance writer and literary translator under his own company, Aemulans Writing and Editing. At Transloadit, A.J. makes sure that everything we share with the outside world, be it through our website or any other medium, is able to meet the highest standard.

We hope you have enjoyed this update about a few days in the lives of the people who make Transloadit possible.

And if not, stay tuned for some more technical updates! :D