Likii, our community leader, wanted to participate in Hacktoberfest challenge organised by Digital Ocean and GitHub last year but couldn't find any repositories that fitted her level of experience with back-end and didn't find many valuable front-end repositories either.

Because of that, Likii has opened up our own repository and hosted a personalised-card challenge for other junior developers in the same situation. By the end of the event our repository collected just over 20 personalised cards and we got to learn how to work as a team. Shoutout to people who helped us with git conflicts at the time 💛

Since that was quite fun, Likii wanted to repeat the experience but unfortunately this was a once per year event. Instead of waiting that long, Likii created our junior developer group in order to work with a small team focusing on front end technologies. A lot has changed since October but we've learned a great deal of things and are ready to show.

We started working as a team in January 2021. At the beginning of our journey we discussed how would we like things to happen and what the rules would be. Shortly after that we have created our set of rules, our members researched Agile methodologies and presented us with Scrum and Kanban workshops - after which we became a team learning to practice Scrum. A couple of weeks after that we replaced Trello (our main ticketing board) with an Open Source Jira Board!

Today we work in sprints and run sprint reviews (friday focus sessions) as well as count just over thirty discord members. As we're growing fast, we needed to re-evaluate the services we're using to support us and have since decided to use WONDR platform to help keep up with everything.

At the moment we're in the process of transfering things over, but feel free to click on a link in the footer and have a poke around 🙂

Our main communication is still happening on our discord channel, but within the next couple of weeks we'll be moving to WONDR, where our main communication tool will be WONDR messenger.

Apart from chatting in text form, we like to meet up on Friday's for about an hour. We talk about our tickets, our blockers, our wins and we also throw in a couple of jokes 🙃 Since many of us aren't native English speakers and aren't available for these meetings, we always post a meeting summary in text form. You can find those in our WONDR community.

We're all coming from various backgrounds and have important stories to tell. Sometimes those backgrounds and/or ideas might clash, sometimes we might say something we didn't mean in that particular way and sometimes it's all just a bit complicated.. In those times, it's important for a team to have built a good foundation for psychological safety and it's growth.

To us, psychological safety means asking the difficult questions, challenging developers who might be more experienced than you are and feeling able to bring up any topic to the table. Psychological safety comes in many shapes and forms but in this team it's all about accepting each other, feeling safe, valued and heard.

In not so recent times, we did have a situation that required active team members to gather around and make a decision. We discussed the issue, shared opinons and provided options. Our aim was to share the burden of 'telling someone off' and the burden of decision making.