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Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Human Made Winter Retreat.

Posted on in News

Although we have lots of lovely apps and tools in place for our day to day collaboration and communication, nothing beats meeting up in person. Human Made has been growing fast and globally and it was definitely time to get everyone together in one place again. Time for another Human Made Retreat!

HM-Vikings

We decided to combine the retreat with WordCamp Norway, in Oslo. It was the first WordCamp that the whole team had attended together; including partners to find out what all the fuss was about. Human Made started the conference by hosting a drinks evening with over 100 types of specialist beer to choose from and then rounded off the conference with Noel presenting “Designing Web Applications” as the final speaker.

WordCamp

After a fantastic weekend at WordCamp Norway we all migrated to the tiny town of Trysil for ski-ing and chalet-based relaxation. Previous retreats have been very work-heavy so this time the plan was to try and get some real down-time, to just chill out and enjoy ourselves as a company. With this in mind the retreat wasn’t just Human Made staff but also partners as well, which really helped everyone to forget about work for a while.

HM Skiing

One of the most memorable evenings of the trip was the five minute Flash Talk presentations, although the time limit may have been stretched by some. Highlights include Tom on the Bonsall Red Barrows (his little known secret identity), Owain on “the secret world of air guitar”, Steffi’s memorable gait analysis and Noel on Lemurs (who would have thought it).

HM-Spa

One morning Joe set everyone a code challenge. The mission was to find out what percentage of the top million sites on the internet are running WordPress? We had two hours working in pairs to provide an answer. Feel free to attempt it and let us know how you get on.

Chalet

The chalet was huge which gave everyone plenty of space to do their own thing. Just being able to spend time with everyone in a relaxed atmosphere without deadlines was really appreciated; usually when we do meet up in person at events and conferences this isn’t able to happen. As a distributed company spending time together is really important for helping to form strong connections and to keep a strong company culture, and more than anything it’s just really good fun.

Everyone