Dev++ Week

At my company (HARMAN IL), R&D employees hold a "Dev Week" after each product release (on average, about 3-4 times a year). During this week, the developers are free to choose a new tool / feature / technology to explore and implement. At the end of this week, there should be some outcome that, somehow, contributes to the product/infrastructure. However, in my opinion, and in concurrence with my mentor, Eyal Mike, who introduced this concept into our organization, this is not the main goal of Dev Week.

As we spend most of our time developing features and fixing bugs, technical debt is aggregated. Refactoring is required and replacing the underlying cache system or implementing from scratch a new dynamic object linking will always be pushed off by urgent issues. One goal of Dev Week is to be able to focus on research and development tasks coming from the developers.

Another main goal of Dev Week is to improve our engineering skills. Software developers grow professionally by reading and writing new code and not only by maintaining a single product. So Dev Week is also an investment in ourselves.

In addition to the above, there are far more benefits to "Dev week", among them:

1. Getting out of our comfort zone – during our daily work, most of us encounter the same programing languages and the same technology stack. For example, I develop new features and maintain our product code which was written mainly in C and Java. However during Dev Week, we have the opportunity to learn, research and experience other program/ framework languages. When you get out of your comfort zone, you boost your skills, and this is even more evident when it comes to software development.
2. Improving your creativity – during this week you have less "noise" from outside. You don't have to be fully focused on the product, and you normally experience less interruptions from your team leader / group manager. In addition, you encounter new challenges that force you to think out of the box.
3. Mixed between team members – you may also be encouraged to work on your project with 2-3 developers that are not necessarily from your team (and even not from your country, spoiler alert 😊 see example below). This increases cooperation and builds new network connections while at the same time improves your communication and interpersonal skills.
4. New cool features and new POC – Dev Week is an ideal time to try new POCs and features that may be very valuable, but due to "system constraints" are ranked with lower priority. It is worth to mention, that some features/ideas that were born in Dev Week were later merged/adopted into the product.

During my most recent Dev Week, I had a great experience working with two of my colleagues, Łukasz Sulikowski and Robert Karolak, both of which, are skilled and senior engineers, that are located in Poland. Our project was to integrate a "standalone" tool that was written in Python (which by the way, was developed in a previous Dev Week), into a desktop application, which is based on web technologies (Electron framework and TypeScript). While I was more focused on Python, my colleagues were focused on the TypeScript, and together we managed to integrate both processes.

To summarize, as engineers we always seek to learn and explore new things, and Dev Week may be a great time for this. It's a great opportunity to improve our creativity by finding "out of the box" solutions to new problems/challenges. If you use your time wisely, you will enrich your programming and technological skills, and even more important, your interpersonal skills.

The writer holds an M.Sc degree from Tel Aviv University in E.E.

He has 6+ years of SW development experience and was in an elite technology unit during his military service (academic reserve program).

https://www.garudax.id/in/eliezer-yucht-51032b142/

eli.yucht@gmail.com