If you check our ePages website you will see that we have an office in Barcelona, wow! Unlike other commercial offices we have a development team, double wow! In this post I am going to explain what it means to live and work in Barcelona from an ePages developer perspective.
Life in Barcelona
Apart from the weather, culture, night life and such a big football team, Barça of course, Barcelona is much more than that. It is the capital of Catalonia, it has almost all the Gaudí heritage, astonishing beaches (like Costa Brava) and big mountains (Pyrenees) in less than 2 hours by car or train. Life is not just working 😉.
For developers
As everybody knows, Barcelona is one of the most important European cities in software development and hosts the Mobile World Congress, which brings amazing opportunities and projects to the city. This attracts talent which enriches the existing pool of meet ups or technical events, where you can participate, learn or collaborate with your thoughts or ideas.
The office
The office is located in the heart of Barcelona, in the Diagonal avenue, where it is full of shops, restaurants and good public transport connections. This excellent location offers us many different ways to come to the office in a decent time and choose what you’d like to eat every day (Galician, French, Japanese or a mix of all of them!) or take away something to the office. The environment in the bureau is nice, right now we are 14 people from 4 different countries and 5 speaking languages, divided in 5 departments (admin, design, development, marketing, and sales). Every Friday morning we have the tea time where we all meet to talk about our ‘things’ and each team is responsible for presenting their last projects.
Events
On regular basis we organise after-work activities like lunches, dinners or sailing days! The company organises other events such as the ePages YOU, which is the convention of the company and takes place in Hamburg. And internal hackathons, where all developers meet for 2 days to just hack away on topics that are of benefit for the company, but not related to the daily business.
Team
Our team currently consists of 4 engineers. But we are looking for a QA and two more developers. The QA, Scrum Master and Product Owner are located in Hamburg and support us in our daily basis work. Our team, together with another team in Hamburg, is responsible for the connectors to the e-commerce platform, such as payments, shippings and others.
Also, as in the company we try to do our best to be as agile as possible, we follow the Scrum principles, we do pair programming, we share our knowledge in daily code reviews, we do presentations, etc.
How do we organise ourselves?
Maybe you are wondering how we manage to organise ourselves without a scrum master and still have time to take a coffee? One of us plays the role of scrum master as well as developer, but when things get crazy we have the Hamburg scrum master to helps us.
The product owner is also located in Hamburg, but we are in touch with him almost every day. He attends our dailies, reviews and plannings. He also comes to Barcelona once a month to discuss the progress of the different projects or plan the new ones.
A sprint takes two weeks, after that we do the review inviting all colleagues, some are joining by video-conference and others personally. After that we take our time to do the retrospective with our backup scrum master and the planning for the next two weeks with the product owner. After the planning we sit together in order to split, analyse and assign tasks for the sprint.
Every morning we do our daily stand-ups and after that a joint review of the code, which we have been doing since the last review. When coding, we try to do pair programming and in early stages of a new development, we sit all together to model the new connector, draw UML diagrams or even code (we use a projector here).
Communication
We use tools that let us stay in touch with the other teams in Germany, specially with the other ‘connector’ team. We have a permanent video-conference connection with our twin team. Also we have the Community Of Practice every second week where we share knowledge, issues and new ideas with other developers.
To communicate with the whole company we use Hipchat, which is a nice chat client, Confluence as Intranet to share knowledge, documentation, etc. and Jira to track our tasks and sprints.
And that’s all more or less. I hope you enjoyed reading.
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