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Advent Calendar named "Advent of Code" - 25 days, 25 features, starting December 1st

‹div›RIOTS' Advent of Code 2021 - Recap

The Challenge

25 days - 25 features: it was a 2021 promise from the team in an effort to challenge ourself and to give back to the community, and well… we delivered!

What started as a fun challenge, fuelled by tons of features ideas and motivation, soon began to be a daily jump-scare as marketing would ask “No pressure, but are we good to go for today?” while someone is sweating, finishing a 14 hours no-break sprint to release the promised feature and crossing fingers than the release won’t break anything. It sometime broke, often not, but we delivered, days after days.

What did we learn

A great stress test for products and processes

Unveiling a gift a day meant that we had to release everyday, putting our reviewing and testing processes under heavy load.

The main benefit was that any issue would be amplified to a point that it became impossible to miss, we became aware of every bottleneck and could work on them one by one.

As we sometime had to cut corners to release on time, technical debt had to be taken into consideration: is the feature future proof? Are we creating dead-weight? We became more efficient at making quick decisions, the right way, hence improving our day to day efficiency.

Hidden team-building exercice

We gathered so much positive feedback from the community, and felt so accomplished, making it happen day after day until the very last one that we came out of these 25 days stronger than ever, as a company and as a team of remote individuals.

We started with a fun one, because it’s Christmas:

Day 1

Then we started using the big guns:

Day 2

Day 3

As the first weekend came up and the team started sharing about food recipe for the coming vacations, we put our hungry minds together and came up with the ultimate open source cake recipe, blueprint included!

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

One week into the challenge, we made it! The daily releases didn’t break anything major so far, better, it highlighted some weaknesses in our release process and forced us to re-think and upgrade said process for productivity gain, it’s a win-win! The try ‘n fail wasn’t probably seen as a pain-free success by 100% of the team members but a win is a win!

Day 7

Day 8

Day 9

Day 10

Time to unveil our secret weapon, a full design System! Based on Material Design, BRICKS makes for the perfect gift, special mention to the Christmas spirited gif!

Day 11

Day 12

Day 13

This one was in our sleeve for a long time, what better to give to a community than a place to hang out and share?

Day 14

Day 15

Day 16

Day 17

Day 18

Day 19

Day 20

Day 21

Day 22

Day 23

Day 24

Day 25