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As of September 2020, Lab Digital organises (remote) sessions for presentations and knowledge sharing, all part of the new Lab Academy program. Because of my enthusiasm for this initiative and the value that Lab Academy brings to the culture of Lab Digital, I want to give you some more information about it.
Sharing knowledge is what the Lab Academy is all about. At first, Lab Academy was coined for our group of back-end developers, taking 1,5 hour every two weeks. However, it soon became apparent that not only our back-enders, but the whole technical department of Lab was interested in this new concept. Front-enders, designers, testers and staff members also quickly joined the first Lab Academy sessions.
Since the start of the program, seven presentations have been given by colleagues. Michael, our VP of Engineering, kicked off by giving an introductory presentation about code documentation. A subject that may not be considered when choosing something to present during these sessions. However, it’s perhaps the most important one in the series of presentations, as writing code documentation forces you to think about the code you write, helps you grow as a developer and helps other developers to understand the codebase and the reasoning behind it.
In the second presentation, Michael gave a deep dive in the Web Server Gateway Interface, or WSGI, which is apparently pronounced as ‘whiskey’, that I did not know. Later on, Kors praised type checking and functions in his favourite language (Typescript), and Boris went into more detail on setting up a Webpack configuration. A few weeks later, Paul brought us back to the roots of HTTP and other protocols, like the text-based predecessor of WWW, Gopher.
Just before Christmas, Mike talked about Wagtail, where he had been a core developer for a while. Wagtail is an open-source Django content management system which we use in many of our projects. Mike gave a bird’s-eye view of the modules, ways to quickly start a project and all kinds of testing functionalities. The first presentation of 2021 was given by Michael. He explained how race conditions work, how such conditions can lead to bugs and how we can prevent these problems during our daily job.
So far we have seen a mix of subjects, from HTTP protocols to Typescript and the Wagtail CMS. Subjects that will be discussed in the future include a deep dive in GraphQL, multithreading with Python and the ins & outs of Docker. While this knowledge all came from within the team, Lab Academy will also make room for presentations by external parties in the future. Such sessions are precisely intended to bring in external knowledge, and are therefore enormously educational.
As a junior developer, I find Lab Academy very valuable so far. Besides inspiring, helping and teaching each other, Lab Academy also creates a pleasant culture. During these sessions, we are (remotely) together, ask questions and provide each other with positive feedback. In my opinion, this culture ensures connection between colleagues and development on a personal level, all in addition to what you learn from the presentations.
Written by Leon (Junior Software Engineer @ Lab Digital).
The Lab Academy is part of the vision to develop our culture. In recent years, we have been working hard to create a culture in which it is possible to develop yourself, among other things. The principle of knowledge sharing is a very important one.
For us, the Lab Academy is an initiative that continues to change. As Leon describes, it started relatively small, but we soon found out that there was broader interest from various disciplines within our company. The group has therefore grown in the meantime, but the relevance of the initiative, the way we set it up and the subjects remain crucial. For this reason, we recently asked the participants for their findings. The outcome? Generally very positive, but I think the trick is to keep looking for what fits at that moment.
As far as we are concerned, the future of the Lab Academy is about continuing to learn from each other. We record the sessions, so perhaps we will expand one day under the guise of ‘open source’ ;).