About 2-3 times a year we get to meet our teammates in-person and hang out and/or work together for a few days.

We sign and acknowledge the code of conduct, buy our plane tickets, we pack and go. 🛫

During my last trip to a week-long in-person meetup, is when it hit me 💡!

Side note, the trip was a blast, a sort of a coding retreat, and having fun make food together, and talking about this and that. And I even saw the second to last stage of La Vuelta España passing by, and I was beyond excited.

Let’s continue…

The concepts of diversity, equality, and inclusion are not in a vacuum. They don’t start and end when you’re on Google Meet or in the DEI Council monthly meeting.

In a remote-first-and-pretty-much-remote-only world like ours, we interact only for a limited amount of time per day. A meeting can last a half our or an hour, pairing sessions can be longer, as can be 1:1s.

These meetings are predictable slices of time in our days, and we are prepared for them, we are in control. But in the in-person setting there is ane aspect of team building, doing activities together, pairing in-person, talk about code or consulting together, relax, and be ourselves in a shared physical space.

It’s important to be able to be ourselves, and we share parts of ourselves that maybe others don’t get to see on a daily basis, like for example they know I love to cycle but they don’t know I could get obsessed to the point of refurbishing a 70s road bike I asked my team lead to bring, and that made me the happiest person in the neighborhood for half a week. Oh did I mention the stage of la Vuelta? 😅

We get to be ourselves and it is a great DEI exercise, it’s real, not practice.

It may seem I’m saying I am a butt when I’m outside of work, or outside of meetings. It’s more subtle than that. It’s a conscious application of our high standards, and of the values we believe in.