At RST, we are continuously committed to nurturing knowledge exchange among our employees, including software developers. We have 5 internal developer communities: frontend, testers, DevOps, React Native, and backend, each holding regular technical meetings. Today, we'd like to tell you a little more about our backend community.
Although invisible to the naked eye and hidden deep under the user interface layer, the backend is rich in solutions and technologies. The backend architecture is mainly responsible for the application’s performance, reliability, and security, where the critical business logic or data processing and management mechanisms are located.
Our meetings are held every Friday. Over the last two meetings, we created a real-time Twitter clone using Elixir. The whole thing was supposed to be a tutorial for people who had never programmed in the language, so it was a good opportunity to get to know the new ecosystem and, at the same time, create something functional. Each participant could clone the repository and go through the steps with the teacher. The GitHub repository, along with a tutorial, is available here.
— Paweł Dorofiejczyk (Software Architect, RST)
Our meetings take place in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Each one is different, and community members take turns as hosts.
Signing up to host a meeting should not involve a lot of preparation. It is more about creating an environment that allows software engineers to share knowledge that we already have and provide mutual inspiration to learn about new solutions. We believe learning from other developers significantly increase our own levels of technical skills. We don't want to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we try to find out how we should actually approach challenges.
We use several technologies, but many aspects we work on are “language agnostic”. It doesn't matter if we write in Node.js, Java, PHP, etc. We are genuinely interested in learning about new languages to know if they are worth considering in the future. This is exactly how the workshop on how to write a simple Twitter application in Elixir started. In our previous meetings, we focused on Golang or Rust.
We often discuss highly technical topics such as Docker, oAuth, TDD, CAP Theorem, and also more general topics such as our approach to code review, learning new things, or various tools we use at work (software, chairs, or microphones)
Thanks to these meetings, I feel that we are building an amazing backend developer community. And the better we know each other, the easier it is to talk to each other and openly share our ideas. It makes us feel that we not only belong to project teams but also to the RST family as a whole.
I see enormous potential in the community and, as a supervisor, want to help other developers make the most of it.
— Paweł Lorenc (Software Developer, RST)
Building offline and online communities is empowered by our core values – openness, cooperation, efficiency, and commitment, which helps us build a culture of feedback, trust, and respect for diversity. We engage in cross-team collaborations to achieve our goals, encouraging proactivity in finding the best solutions and means to our goals. We are sure this form of knowledge exchange within RST is a great opportunity for us to develop and implement new, better solutions. RST Software provides tremendous support for our communities, which we greatly appreciate and always look forward to the next meeting!
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