I had a great week last week as I was able to spend 3 days with our entire technical organization in D2L when we got together in once place to share our knowledge with each other. This is the second year D2L has done this conference, branded InFUSION (makes sense when you know our user conference for our customers is called FUSION), and it was an incredible time. Over those 3 days, we had ~40 different sessions covering aspects like leadership, culture, and technology, another set of unconference slots, and 4 main keynotes including one on Modern Agile from Josh Kerievsky.
It is always great to reflect on our progress as we grow as a technical organization, the lessons learned, mistakes made and experiments tried. In looking at the year since InFUSION 2015, I see things that were previous topics (Hypermedia APIs, SPE, design story-mapping) that have resulted in advances in how the technology, engineering, and design organization tackles problem-solving – which shows me how much of a meaningful experience to our team the week has become.
The selection of topics this year were no less impressive – Root Cause Analysis & How Teams Can Take Ownership, Modeling Ways for Impactful Influence, SQL Concurrency at Scale, Monoliths Journey to Microservices, Designing a Simpler User Experience with Data just to name a few. Everyone had an openness, a willingness and a drive to both contribute to the improvement of the company and to learn from their peers for the three days.
It was also incredible to have everyone all in one place. We have offices all over – Vancouver, Boston, Winnipeg, Toronto, Melbourne … and to have folks come and connect with each other on a deeper level is something that cannot be valued ever by only plane tickets and hotel bills. I’m thankful that we have the ability to bring folks together and have team-building for the entire organization — it expedites teamwork, project alignment, and creative solutions and is always worth the energy.
And if you want to be part of this conference next year, we’re hiring. 🙂
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