On the 22nd of March this year we kicked off our annual company conference, Scapegoat. This is a weekend we host once per year where we get all of our staff under one roof.
Everybody met on Friday evening, and we started our weekend with a few drinks at The Queen of Hope Street, a bar with a wide selection of beers and board games. Here we hosted an impromptu Guess Who tournament before heading over to The Bridewell and having a few more drinks in one of their refurbished prison cells. Not long later we decided to call it a night and began getting ready for the first day of Scapegoat proper.
The next morning we had our first session, a warm-up for the rest of the day. This was hosted by James Barber (Chief Executive) and Zack Walker (Chief Operating Officer) and consisted of a series of epistemic logic puzzles. These were tricky to solve and led to a series of debates over the logic required for each puzzle but were very rewarding once the solution was found and got our heads in the game. Later, we had an interesting meeting about hosting our server infrastructure. Alfie Jones (Chief Technology Officer) led a session discussing how we plan to deploy our various services using Amazon Web Services (AWS). This meeting resulted in a very intricate diagram on our white board detailing how all of our services would interact, and the stack they would exist in. This was extremely beneficial as we could visually see the plan for how we’ll deploy all of the software we’re working on, right in front of us. We discussed server costs and the ideal way to handle requests, and how we can optimise our plans to be as efficient as possible.
This session really pushed me outside of my area of expertise and it was a great opportunity to learn about different hosting methods and server architectures. We also dove into CI/CD and the ideal flow for developing, testing, and pushing changes to production.
Another interesting session we held was attempting to use accessibility tools on different websites. We quickly learnt that a website needs optimised alternate text on each component for a smooth experience, and that the vast majority of websites we tried failed in this aspect. We attempted to register for a Google account using their new UI, but found it nearly impossible as some components were inaccessible using the Tab key, and others had no alternate text at all, so it was impossible to know when it was selected.
We then attempted use our own website with a screen-reader to see how well we could navigate it, and while we had designed it with accessibility in mind, we still found that some components had their default alternate text and other areas were difficult to find and interact with, but we took notes on these and made plans to improve this in future. We also learnt more about successfully building these components to be more interactive with screen-readers.
Overall this Scapegoat was spent focussing on major projects and the big picture side of our software, which allowed us to make substantial and long-term plans for the future.