Build up your team by harnessing their individual strengths

Lots of Boost’s teams have recently been running a retrospective that our Agile Lead Rebecca came up with.

If you’re new to Agile, a retrospective is a meeting that looks back at how your team has been working in order to identify improvements for the future. You don’t need to be Agile to run a retrospective though.

If you’re looking to spark up your team, the Individual strengths retro is a great option. By reflecting on what each team member brings to the party, you remind them how they contribute to the team’s success. As well as finding practical ways to take advantage of their strengths, you inspire and energise the team.

Jobs at Boost

To keep up with demand for our services, we’re looking to recruit a new batch of Boosters.

We’re looking for people who share our core values and:

• like solving complex problems
• enjoy collaborating with clients and colleagues
• want to work in a high-performing Agile team which delivers valuable software sprint after sprint.

Here’s more detail on the roles:

Software developers / engineers

Your key responsibilities will be:

• working closely with our clients and designers to deliver solutions to complex problems 
• iteratively delivering projects that make New Zealand a better place
• maintaining our Continuous Integration services (Github Actions and Gitlab Pipeline) running tests, linters, security and accessibility audits and deployments
• developing high quality and well-tested code
• managing our clients infrastructure as part of your day-to-day job — as a self-sufficient Agile team we don’t have separate DevOps staff
• continuously learning and sharing knowledge to grow the dev team capabilities.

A day as a developer at Boost could include:

• solving interesting and complex problems on bespoke Rails projects
• using libraries and frameworks such as React, Vue.js, Foundation and UIKit
• managing our clients’ applications in Docker using either Kubernetes or AWS ECS.
• collaborating with our designers to build beautiful interfaces that maximise user experience and accessibility
• Agile meetings with the client and your team, such as daily stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog refining and sizing project work
• presenting your team’s work to the client at a sprint review and participating in a sprint retrospective.

Learn more about how to apply for a developer role

UX / UI designers

Your key responsibilities will be:

• working closely with clients and developers to design and deliver software that solves complex problems
• iteratively designing solutions from ideation through to execution for projects that make New Zealand a better place
• creating design systems that embed our clients’ brands in their digital experiences
• user research and user testing
• promoting user-centric design and sharing design knowledge across Boost.

A day as a designer at Boost could include:

• daily stand-up meetings with your teams and clients
• working closely with developers to implement accessible design solutions
• running a user testing session
• facilitating a workshop with clients
• presenting your team’s work to the client at a sprint review
• helping our sales team with client pitches and telling the Boost story in a visual way
• working with the rest of the design team, giving and getting feedback and looking for ways to improve our design processes.

Learn more about how to apply for a designer role

Taking cultural heritage collections to the people

Cultural heritage institutions often want to share their collections online. Sometimes these collections are held in different systems, or by different institutions. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to pull these disparate collections together into a single engaging, consistent, easy-to-search website?

Well, rhetorical question fans, there is. It’s called Supplejack and it’s an award-winning open-source platform that any gallery, library, archive or museum can use to take their treasures to the people.

A tight-knit team

What do Agile coaches get up to after a day spent creating tight-knit teams? More knitting.

Mette, Rebecca and Ruka have started their own knit club, getting together after work for a knit and natter.

Rebecca’s been knitting for years, but Mette and Ruka are relative beginners. Undaunted, they’ve skipped the easy stuff and jumped straight to jumpers.

Here be dragons

Ever wondered what the internet would look like visualised as an old school map? Inspired by the xkcd Map of Online Communities, Martin Vargic from Halcyon Maps has put one together.

Ironically, the level of detail makes it easy to get lost in the thing.