What I love most about working with ambitious people with a thirst for knowledge, is the fact that they’re usually self-driven high achievers who are constantly trying to push technology and business forward, the problem with those however, is that they get bored easily when they no longer have challenging work or something new to learn, the first is never a problem for a web development company, as for the second, that's why we host weekly BOF sessions.
If you’re wondering what a BOF is, it's ok, we didn't know either until we attended our first DrupalCON event. BOF stands for a Birds of a Feather session, a quick 30 to 60 min discussion between office mates or conference attendees on a specific topic. The nature of a BOF session is usually informal, fun, and extremely useful, and is led by someone with a high level of expertise on the topic, and open for all interested attendees.
At Vardot, we made it a rule that each Monday we'll have two BOF sessions hosted at our offices, one with technical people in mind, and another for those of us who don’t know how to write code. Both sessions are open for everyone, so, if you find yourself nearby on a Monday afternoon, we expect you to pass by.
In the past few weeks, we hosted BOF sessions covering topics ranging from Drupal 8 theming and BitBucket pull requests, to content marketing and the theory of constraints in business. The positive effects of those BOF sessions were clear on productivity, team building, and communication. The number of misunderstandings between techies and non-techies dropped considerably, productivity on Mondays increased, and appreciation of departmental work by everyone at the company went up as well.
So, if you work in a technology company, or any company for that matter, you should definitely bring BOF events up on your next meeting. Next Monday, I’ll be talking briefly about Google Analytics on my BOF session, I’d love to see you all here, and I’d love to hear suggestions on topics you’d like to learn about next.