This post was published on April 1st, 2022, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

In this picture, we can see an Agile team in its natural habitat at Allegro:

Learning and development are very important to us at Allegro. This absolutely not staged photo shows Piotr (right) reading out loud from a book about a newfangled language called BASIC. Piotr is a Product Owner, and he knows the development team needs to keep learning all the time in order to stay current with technology. He himself has amassed a personal collection of 8-bit machines in order to hone his technical skills, and now he’s sharing what he has learned with others.

Listening with great attention are two software engineers, Artur (left) and Kacper (center). Until recently, Artur was the most junior member of the team. Nonetheless, when new people were joining us, he was their buddy, the go-to contact for any questions, whose role is to put them on track as efficiently as possible. He did so well, and liked this role so much, that at one point we literally had to stop him in order to give others a chance to try their hand at being buddies, too. But nothing is lost, since the whole team, not just the buddy, helps onboard new people. Artur is already thinking deeply about teaching BASIC to our future teammates.

Kacper, in contrast, is one of the senior team members. He was already there when we started introducing Kotlin in our projects a few years ago. Learning a new language is great fun, and you can already see Kacper smile at the thought of replacing all those complex functional constructs with a few simple GOTO statements. Keen observers will also notice on the desk Kacper’s stopwatch he uses for timing performance-critical pieces of code. Many of our systems have demanding performance requirements, and it’s thanks to experienced people like him that we are able to meet them.

Obviously, this is not even the whole team, so you can easily imagine that anything is possible with such people and attitude. Happy April!