Meltwater is very happy to be Bronze sponsor for Stretch Conference 2016, which will take place in Budapest on December 1st/2nd.

After a big group from Meltwater visited Craft Conference earlier this year, we were excited to see that the same organizers were hosting a leadership & management conference as well, so sponsoring the event was only logical for us.

With Rona Steinrücken & Ola Sundin we also have speakers from Meltwater at the event, which will make it even more fun for us to attend the conference to cheer for them. :)

On August 16th, we hosted the AWS User Group Meetup in the Meltwater Berlin Office. It was our first time hosting the AWS meetup and we would like to share with you what the meetup talks were about and also our experience in hosting a meetup in our Berlin office.

At Meltwater we use RabbitMQ for messaging. We have several clusters and had a need for a new cluster. This made us ask the question: how is the message rate affected by the hardware chosen for the cluster? Should we go for more CPU cores? Or maybe faster disks? Are there other things to consider to get the best performance out of RabbitMQ? This blog post tries to answer those questions.

After a particularly rough couple of months last year, our team (of six) decided it was time for a radical move. At the point we were so downtrodden that our small hope that it would at least provide something new was enough of a motivation for us to decide on a two month experiment: we would try mob programming.

This April about 40 colleagues from Meltwater went to Craft Conference in Budapest. We did not plan for it that way, but it ended up like a mini kick-off for the Product & Engineering teams in Europe.

It turned out to be an amazing conference with many great speakers that shared their thoughts about how we can collectively improve our craft and create better products for it.

Summarizing Craft Conference in this blog post would not do it justice. Instead we want to share our thoughts on why we are sending our people to conferences in the first place.