Hi Guys,
At our office, every week we have a knowledge sharing session called SpriteXchange.
Last month, Some of our colleagues gave such wonderful talks about a variety of topics. We enjoyed and learnt something new and interesting. I’d like to share some of those experiences in this blog.
First session of the August month happened on Aug 1, 2014.
One of our DevGurus, Sivakumar presented and demonstrated how our development environments and process can be made better with Vangrant. He explained that why we should use Vagrant and what are the features, etc. He gave a live demo of Vagrant as well which was cool. After installing Vagrant via VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, or any other provider, He generated the package box and shared with us. We played with it. Definitely, Windows RoR devs would love it because they escape from the gem installation errors while installing most of the gems in Windows such as,
[source]
ERROR: Error installing unicorn:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
[/source]
He also explained a a little bit about Vagrant Cloud. It’s useful to share our boxes with our team. Download Vagrant and make your life easier. 🙂
During the next 30 minutes, Our DevOps Chef, Prabu presented his “Growth Hacking using Mixpanel” talk. He started his talk with a beautiful quote by Mattan Griffel who is a Growth Hacking Guru.
“Growth hacking is a set of tactics and best practices for dealing with the problem of user growth.”
During the session, we discussed about questions related to “Users life cycle for our product” and “Getting more users” etc.
Prabu also talked about some other tools including –
1. Kissmetrics
2. Usertesting
3. Optimizely
4. Unbounce
He shared his experience about Mixpanel tool and exhibited his experimented application at http://bookmarks-mixpanel.herokuapp.com/ and also illustrated how he used Mixpanel to help the project he works on, SiteFly, grow. Wow, should try it in my future projects.
Second session of this month, happened on Aug 11, 2014.
Our testing don, Rajalakshmi presented a topic about “Kaizen”. It was new to us. She explained the key concepts and various stages of Kaizen. It was really interesting. Finally, she proposed to use Kaizen for management.
The Last session of this month, happened on Aug 28, 2014.
One of our book worms, Balaji reviewed the new book he had been reading – “Transform Your Habits – James Clear”. He gave some inspirational thoughts about this book that were interesting and mind blowing. This book contains lots of practical examples about how we can change our thoughts, how we warm up our mind without external activities and most importantly how to build habits and so on. Definitely, we should all read this wonderful book.
August was really great and the team learnt a lot of stuff from each other. I am looking forward to the SpriteXchange sessions of September. I will at the end of September write about the new and hot things we talked about at SpriteXchange!
