Knowledge sharing - best practises and examples

In Divante, we always stress the development of our employee’s abilities. That’s why we take every opportunity to find new ways of sharing knowledge and experience among our team members. Space in our office is one of the ways to spread inspiring ideas. The other are the meetings. We use them to discuss the newest eCommerce technologies and trends. It is also a great time to get to know each other and building relations. Here’s how it works:

Bookcrossing

The idea is quite simple – to share a book. All of us have good books in our libraries lying around and collecting dust. Through bookcrossing, we give them the opportunity of a second life. The beginning was extremely easy to bring this idea to life. All we did was to find a bookshelf, put it into our “chill room” and write an email to everyone at the company to share a book. As a result, we gathered a considerable number of books – there are so many of them, that the shelf became overcrowded almost instantly, and we were forced to commandeer a window sill for overflow.

Sharing the books became our tradition. Now our team members can bring books as they want, not only about eCommerce. We also complement this collection with eCommerce, technologies, management and business bestsellers.

PS. We also have a walls displaying our recommended “must reads” :)

Divante Academy

For our new team members, we prepared Divante Academy. It’s a vast source of knowledge on technologies that we use in the biggest eCommerce projects. Divante Academy has been prepared by our experts and focuses on the practical aspects of different platforms (like Magento, Pimcore, Oro). All organized in thematically organized blocks that end with short tests and evaluation program.

For new interns and junior devs, we also organize cyclic training covering topics like Git, Docker, application security and TDD, Vagrant and Ansible just to name few.

TED

We all know TED talks. And we all know how inspiring they can be. At Divante, there’s a constant flow of emails recommending newly discovered TED talks. That’s why we decided to choose the most inspiring ones and add them in as murals throughout the office.

Now, every time you go to the kitchen to make your morning coffee or have a break waiting for another meeting, you can find some inspiration in a golden thought from Alan Kay, Simon Sinek, Ernesto Sirolli and from other TED talks on the wall right next to you.

EDU Hours

We’ve managed to organize many interesting EDU Hours since 2013 when our HR department initiated the idea. They observed that as our company grows, individuals and entire departments have fewer interactions with one another. The goal of this series is to animate the flow of knowledge throughout the office. It’s a series of mini-speeches (each of them takes 1 hour), led by one of Divante’s employees.

Since its origin, we’ve managed to organize many interesting EDU Hours that included topics on marketing, soft skills, and project management. The eCommerce tools and techniques have a special place in our company. Just recently we shared knowledge on block-chain, Docker & Kubernetes, Vue.js, OrientDB & GraphQL, design patterns and database optimization. Our spacious office makes it even easier to share people’s expertise with others thanks to conference rooms that are adapted for such events.

Meetups and hackathons

The world of technology is changing constantly. As an IT company, we need to be up-to-date with all the nuances of the industry. That’s why we organize meetups, contribution days and hackathons. These are events on which we invite speakers from other companies, industries, and organizations. Often our team members that suggest to us, who to invite. That’s how we came up with the idea of Wro Open Source and lately, we organized Magento Contribution Day and Vue Storefront Hackathon.

We keep our meetups opened for eCommerce community. People can join us in our office in Wrocław or remotely. The meetups are rather informal. It’s the greatest way to exchange opinions and inspire others.