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There’s something special about getting the whole gang together. Whether it’s family, a specific group of friends, or in our case, the whole FM crew.

About a week ago, Kelly and Jonathan flew into Richmond, and we had the whole team in the office at the same time. (Well, almost. Alex M was on vacation, but for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll say he was still here in spirit, albeit in far-off lands).

To sum it up, the office was bustling, and we shared a decent amount of learning, laughter, and life. Here’s how:

Learning

Since we had Kelly here, live, in person, we took the opportunity to glean some of her technical knowledge. She led a training session on Gulp and other technologies to better streamline our internal development process, in line with her blog post: Our Baseline Gulp Build Process. It included setting up gulp, npm, and bower on our sites, running gulp tasks that make development and production ready files, and learning about how each of the different pieces fit together to form the whole flow.

The end result: the session was super informative and will help facilitate better collaboration. By normalizing how we structure each site and where things are located, we’re able to jump into a project and know what’s going on, making it easier and quicker for us to help each other out, offer feedback, and brainstorm together.

Laughter

Who knew taking portrait photos, a usually arduous endeavor, would provide so much laughter? With everyone around, we decided to take advantage of the momentous occasion and have an all-out “picture day.” Around here, picture day usually falls on the lower side of the awesome spectrum (see exhibit A below), but this time around, it became an event in its own right.

We made one slight change to the picture day flow. Everyone had a buddy, so I’d snap one person’s photos while the other used strategic tactics to crack a smile. You know, just your typical stand-up comedy acts, the inevitable bunny ears, an impromptu dance party, and even reverse musical chairs, when the music would start as someone sat in the hot seat. We had some cases when people were laughing TOO much to take a picture, but all-in-all, we got some great pics. Here are some highlights.

Life

So besides the triple alliteration, I chose the word “life” because we worked hard, and we also took some time to get out of the office and into the city. There were meals to be had, sights to see, and an afternoon at the pool hall a few blocks away where competitive pool playing ensued. And by competitive, I mean Mike blew everyone out of the metaphorical green pool table water.

Fortunately for all our clients, I don’t think we will be transitioning to the professional pool playing industry. We’ll just stick with what we’re good at and love, developing awesome sites and apps for awesome people.