For one week, our office was the host of 4 young developers from Germany. It all started when Andrea Herzog-Kienast, founder of T3Rookies, contact us to share her idea of rookies in the big TYPO3 Community. The idea was to receive 4 German rookies at our office for one week during which they should work on a TYPO3 project and, doing so, extending their TYPO3 knowledge, but more importantly, experience how it is to work in a team. The project would be nicknamed “T3Rookies Summer Camp”.
We were immediately excited about the ideea and accepted the challenge. In exchange, we also searched for a Romanian rookie to take part in the project and live & work in Germany for one week. Our rookie – Alex, who did not work so far with TYPO3, is involved in a nice project, “Today Software Magazine”, which publishes a monthly magazine and holds events for the programming community from Cluj. We wanted him to have a nice experience with TYPO3 and thus further spread the word in Cluj.
Choosing the project turned out to be easier than we thought because we keep a close contact with various charity organizations that help children from the poor rural areas or orphans & abandoned kids. This is how we met Aksza Foster House in December 2014, our colleagues met the children and we gave them Christmas gifts, but we decided we wanted to help them further. Aksza did not have a website and for them it was important to able to share their message on the internet. So, since we are good in making websites, it was a natural choice to help them this way and get involved the rookies in a good cause.
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We had a great time hosting the Rookies for a week and working together with them.We were happy to see many of our colleagues involved in helping the Rookies with the project, but also in social activities, as the Summer Camp is also a good moment to share cultural experiences, for the Rookies to know more about Cluj and Romania, to have fun, and for our people to know more about the life of a young developer in Germany. Outside work activities included visit Turda Salt Mine, bowling, eat sushi and movie-evenings.
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Building a website from first contact with the client until delivery to production server has passed rookies through all the challenges a project faces, from conflicts to the value of good team communication & synchronization.
It was a good experience, it was fun, it was rewarding and it was a success. We also learned some things about how we could organize the camp better in the upcoming editions, and for sure we want to move forward next year and participate in an even larger TYPO3 Rookies program, which hopefully will gather more Rookies and more agencies from all over Europe.
