Doughnut Calls

Description

Doughnut calls take place once a week on Fridays and we have 3 different slots to accommodate for all timezones and overlaps.

Background

This started as an idea of having randomly assigned small groups of 3-5 team members getting together for a chat. An internal data puller would align team members based on timezones to ensure that you got to speak with someone new as much as possible. Invites were usually sent out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. The goal of these calls was to get to know other balenistas in a fun and relaxed setting. These calls were not mandatory but highly encouraged for you to attend and non-work related conversation was also encouraged.

If for some reason no-one showed up in the call (possibly due to last-minute scheduling conflicts) you were welcome to join another doughnut call that was listed on our shared Balena social Google calendar. There was also a Doughnut Opt-outs tab within the Team Model Google sheet where you could exclude yourself from these meetings for any period of time. You can find that document here.

If you are curious about how the Doughnut scheduler works, you can find more details here: https://github.com/balena-io/doughnut-scheduler/blob/master/README.md

Super Doughnut calls

After running the doughnut calls for a long time, we realized the attendance had dropped and quite a few calls were not being attended. Therefore, we thought to create a bigger pool for each call and that's how the super doughnut calls were created!