Byteboard Retreat in Catskills

July 24 to July 29, 2022

Catskills, NY

Theme: The Big Dipper 🌌

The focus for the Q3 2022 Byteboard Retreat was on building culture. Company culture is everyone’s responsibility and is shaped by our little and BIG interactions. Culture is our beliefs, values, behaviors, and, generally, how we work together at Byteboard.

This retreat will be successful if we:

1. Understand and buy-in on Byteboard company values
2. Identify how Byteboard company values inform our work
3. Elevate trust across individuals, team, and organization
4. Feel energized commitment to mission and Byteboard cake 🧁

We will discuss the following:

• What is the Byteboard we are building?
• How do we build and maintain Byteboard’s culture? What do we want to add?
• How might we continue to maintain and build trust as the organization goes?
• What mark do we want to leave for future ventures?

Gratitude shared by teammates

Everyone had the opportunity to anonymously share gratitude about each team member.

• I admire Frances' commitment to equity, advocacy for the Latinx in tech, and her partner and corgis. Frances tends to have great ideas and acts with a sense of urgency whether it's candidate love, updates to LinkedIn, etc. Thank you Frances!
• Really loved getting to know Frances this trip, she always seems to have intelligent and helpful insights in most scenarios, and I was super impressed by her ability to mock up a candidate love page in almost no time at all (would love to see that turn into a reality, how do we make it happen)?Also, I still remember when Frances was the last villager alive, surrounded by wolves. It's a core memory for me now haha.
• Has great ideas and generally breaks arguments down quite nicely. Generally very helpful when being approached and even brings people treats! Good candidate for playing any kind of game with the team.
• I love how Frances is energized by personal goals she's set for herself, and more so, achieving goals left and right, building out her personal brand in a major way.
• Frances is extremely funny, calm, and always willing to speak her mind. I really admire how she communicates very directly and clearly, and she always is willing to help out and give back to the people around her or the situation at hand. I've gotten to know her better through the retreat, and I respect so much how she knows what she likes in life, knows her routines, knows her interests, etc. and she adheres to those values so strongly. We're lucky to have her!
• I admire all the things you do outside of work to help support other people become their best selves. Not a lot of people are able to work so hard at their day job and then have the energy to step into the role of a mentor and leader for their community. Keep doing what you do!
• Frances can give and take which is fun. I like how she's open about some of the things that have challenged her in the past and how she's going about tackling them. I would like to see some improvement in her Mario Cart skills though.
• I appreciate Frances' hard work, dedication, and humor. I admire her clear vision of her personal goals and the incredible work she's done for the team!
• It is so cool seeing how clear you are in your goals and aspirations as an individual. You are so committed to pulling others up with you and I have not doubt that you will create ripples in the tech industry.
• I really admire how detail-oriented you are as an engineer. Everything you do is so meticulously documented, your PR summaries are so thorough, and you do everything you can to engineer the codebase following best practices.
• I'm personally grateful for my dogs and the pretty chill life I'm leading right now. While everyone in life will always have problems they have to deal with, I've made it a goal to have problems I wouldn't mind having and that's where I am right now. My biggest problems seem so innocent compared to what I faced before and I want to continue that trajectory.
• I've truly loved hanging out with you this retreat, especially playing werewolf :). I'm also constantly in awe of your skills as an engineer, especially seeing you build the wall of candidate love so quickly. You are incredibly adept at keeping your eye on the goal of a conversation and managing the flow to always achieve it.
• Frances is so on top of things - the whole skills report redesign was really impressive to watch as she managed every part of that project, from doing planning and milestoning to pairing with Kriti on polishing the details. Can't wait to see what she does next!
• Frances I really appreciate you helping with taking notes and helping keep the team informed, especially as we grow bigger as a team. Also, every time you shared with the team during discussion I thought it was so powerful and everything you

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