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.

We created a new video, describing how we work in Product & Engineering at Meltwater. We are quite proud of how the video turned out and we had lots of fun creating it. Therefore we hope you will like it to.

At Meltwater we are providing our customers with great tools to analyse news and social media, unlocking business critical insights. However all of this content is written text. Therefore some other forms of media remain unconquered. Formats that are becoming increasingly dominant in all online media. Today, we want to present our plan to conquer audio and video.

On October 14, 2015, Meltwater co-launched nh.js in conjunction with Thunderhead and Alexander Technology Group, nh.js is a meetup group for JavaScript programming enthusiasts in Manchester, New Hampshire. The group holds events at local startup incubator Alpha Loft and has thrived with regular monthly meetups, steadily increasing membership to just over 240 developers from the local community.