14 posts tagged with “culture”

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Reducing friction in balena device support with our heuristic diagnostics parser

Every six months or so, our company takes a break from most of our normal activities to engage in a “Hack Week,” a week of working on a project completely outside of our day-to-day tasks. People form small teams and work on projects around a common theme, and embark on a friendly competition for bragging rights, swag, and the potential to finalize their product for the masses to use. Hack Week…

June 09, 2022 / 10 min

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Blocks: new management functionality and a public roadmap for what's next

Today, our concept for IoT app enablement graduates from a concept to a first-class entity in the balenaCloud dashboard, with plenty of exciting roads still left to travel. It's a long, interesting road for balena Blocks This post is about what you can do with blocks today, why we needed to correct course, and where we are heading with Blocks in the future. Buckle up– here we go! What’s a Block…

March 03, 2022 / 8 min

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The balenaCloud dashboard: why we change stuff and move things

There’s a lot of thought and reasoning behind what seem like trivial changes that I want to share with you all publicly. From the outside, I feel that the effort that we put in to ensure things such as product longevity, maintainability, and reliability may not be obvious, so I want to explore that today. Chris here, your friendly neighborhood product guy, back with another attempt to take down a…

February 14, 2022 / 12 min

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balenaLabs Residencies: our quest to improve onboarding at balena

Onboarding is more than learning your new role and meeting teammates. It’s also about managing your own expectations, that of others, and finding a way to get as much context about your new role and company as possible. balenaLabs logo Here's how balena used the feedback and observations of new joiners to try a new way to onboard new teammates and put them on a path toward success. I remember my…

December 02, 2021 / 11 min

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balenaPodcast episode 05: Consilience, how we can better understand everything and each other

In this episode, we’re joined by Tom Beakbane, author of How to Understand Everything: Consilience: A New Way to See the World. Tom and Alex dig into consilience, the twin sibling of science. While science helps us better understand the natural and physical world, consilience is how we agree and understand the approaches of those subjects. The two discuss how the practice of consilience can help…

November 23, 2021 / 72 min

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balenaPodcast episode 04: Better orgs for the future, applying systems thinking, and what's next for Agile and Lean

Software Development Coach, Chris R. Chapman, joins the balenaPodcast to talk about what next-gen engineering leaders need to build better organizations. Chapman discusses why systems thinking is critical for any new leader, as well as applying psychology and empathy into the mix. He reminds us of the management thinking of luminaries like Deming, Ackoff, Taguchi, and more, while encouraging new…

September 22, 2021 / 93 min

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balena monthly roundup - October 2020

Hello there, readers! We’re energized and inspired after this year’s remote 2020 Summit event! Also, did you know that we built a feature in a day? Try out high-level device metrics in the dashboard. Fresh from the lab are guides on starting your own local AI project using Edge Impulse, and how to add Deploy with balena to your next IoT project to improve how other users adopt and share it. As…

October 13, 2020 / 5 min

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How we ran a virtual summit for 100 people

Here at balena, our annual teamwide Summit is the banner event in our calendar year. As a globally distributed team, Summit is when we bring everybody together to build deeper relationships, reflect on how we work, and align on our vision for the future. Past Summits have been held in cities such as Athens and Barcelona and involved flying people from 30+ countries to a single location for a week…

October 06, 2020 / 7 min

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balena monthly roundup - July 2020

This month we’re excited to share some news about Rosetta@home. The research team has found proteins that potentially neutralize COVID-19 in lab tests. Thanks to everyone for your continued help here via Fold for Covid! Looking for a summer project? If you want to try AI at the edge, try OpenDataCam, or if you want a beautiful way to share quotes and messages with others, check out InkyShot. As…

July 06, 2020 / 3 min

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New to working remotely? Here are some tips from our global fully-distributed team

Recent events have caused companies to enforce remote work policies, surprising many people around the world who might be used to going into the office. While it might seem easy to accomplish on paper, remote work comes with its own set of challenges. We embrace the remote work lifestyle at balena As a fully-distributed company, balena proudly nurtures a strong remote work culture that creates a…

March 18, 2020 / 6 min

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IoT professionals: define your role

If you’re like most IoT professionals, you’re something of a jack-of-all-trades who’s part full-stack engineer, edge developer, hardware specialist, network guru, data analyst, and visionary all rolled into one. But what do you call yourself? Just as “system administrator” doesn’t really tell the whole story anymore, modern alternatives like “DevOps Engineer” or “Cloud Architect” or “Security…

March 17, 2020 / 1 min

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The unreasonable effectiveness of algorithms in boosting team happiness

Distributing shifts fairly and efficiently between a team of people has been a long standing challenge. With the rise of remote working and the distribution of teams across different time zones, this challenge has become exponentially more difficult. It’s an awful problem to solve by hand, but can be very interesting and rewarding when you do it with advanced constraint programming algorithms! At…

November 21, 2019 / 14 min

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Summit 2019, Barcelona: that’s a wrap

Last month we brought the entire balena team to Barcelona to meet, greet, hack on projects, plan for tomorrow, and have a great time together. Here are some highlights from balena’s 2019 annual summit. Why do we do this every year? Being a fully remote company, the annual summit gives the entire team a chance to socialize, collaborate, share ideas and make plans for the year ahead. There’s only so…

November 07, 2019 / 3 min

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Support-driven Development

Update February 2022: We've grown a lot since this post was initially published in 2015, and as such our support tools and processes have changed and grown too. However, the idea of support driven development described below still holds true and continues to be practised at balena to this day. Traditionally, support is treated as an afterthought, a thing you outsource, or perhaps something you…

July 27, 2015 / 7 min