Discourse Team Building Exercise 2013

Discourse is a distributed team on several different continents and time zones.

In fact, some of us have never even met in real life. Until the Discourse Team Building Exercise 2013, that is.

(Pictured from left: Robin, Régis, Neil, Sam)

The whole Discourse team flew in to San Francisco for a week to attend the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, or GoGbnjxca1 for short. Sam presented a talk (the opening talk for the conference, no pressure or anything) on Ruby performance that was well received.

We've done a ton of work to make Discourse fast, and we try our best to feed those improvements to the upstream open source projects so everyone can benefit.

We picked an AirBnB location in the city with 4 bedrooms so everyone could stay together. It was right on the cable car line on Powell, so it was about as San Francisco as you can get without scarfing down bowls of Rice-a-Roni during a 49ers game. We also took part in a San Francisco treasure hunt in the Embarcadero area, courtesy of Mr. Treasure Hunt. Fun!

(From left: Robin, Sam, Jeff, Neil)

If you're wondering why the shirts say Team Building Exercise '99, well, there's a reason: it's business time at Discourse.

No, seriously: 2014 is the year where we will actually start taking money for Discourse deployments and hosting. We hope!

It wasn't all just fun and games for the week, either. Robin and Régis built a nifty new spoiler plugin for Discourse, and Neil put the finishing touches on our initial mobile design pass, while Sam and Robin met with the Rails Girls team they are mentoring to produce a Discourse oneboxing plugin.

It was great to finally meet the team in person. Here's to Discourse Team Building Exercise '99 2014 and beyond!