Essential presentations
Over the years, we have run a number of Summits with presentations that cover our mission, vision, and work, as well as thoroughly reflect our culture and way of working. Naturally, the Summit recordings quickly became a great onboarding resource for new starters. There is now a plethora of presentations that balenistas can check out in order to gain some context about specific areas of work, projects, and approaches. We encourage new balenistas to have a look through the Summit folders (linked further down) and see which ones might be relevant and helpful to the work they will be doing. As some older material might be out of date, your balena buddy and other balenistas can offer suggestions and guide you too. We have put together a list of presentations on this page as a thorough introduction to balena. We highly encourage you to spend some time watching these! You can also check the Summit folders for the presentation slides if that is helpful.
For a full list of videos, check out the summit recordings folder and enjoy watching!
Our mission & vision
We suggest that you start by watching the below recordings to get an overview of our mission, vision, and progress so far.
Vision Week 2021 - Balena from first principles: product architecture and how to answer hard questions {starts at 13m30s}
Summit 2020 - Where we came from, where we’re going {starts at 18m45s}
If you would like to learn more about the story of balena and how everything started, you can watch the Summit 2019 - Our mission presentation or you can listen to this Front Range Founders podcast.
Every year at Summit, Alex delivers an opening talk that focuses on our mission & vision if you want to get more background and see how everything has evolved over time. Every Summit day includes a keynote presentation that covers the main areas, projects and ideas we are actively working on during the year.
Core mindset
Balena is different in many ways and the concept of Product Builder summarizes the profile of an ideal balenista that we all aspire to. Check the Product Builder handbook page for more information.
Understanding the Loop:
- Summit 2019 Presentation
- Q & A
- Recording 1 (starts at the 40 minute mark)
- Recording 2 (starting at 10 minutes)
Vision Week 2021 - Being a Product Builder at balena {starts at 15m15s}
Not essential to watch, but helpful if you want to learn more about some of our core values and approaches which have shaped the Product Builder concept:
Summit 2019 - Values & Structures
Summit 2019 - Building a Culture of Radical Candor and Transparency
More Summit presentations and material
Hack weeks
While we have been unable to meet in person as we would normally do every year, we decided to spend some more time hacking and exploring ideas outside our day-to-day work! This is a great representation of how passionate the team is about continuously improving our products and processes
productOS
productOS (aka Jellyfish) is the platform and infrastructure that supports our team to build, maintain and continuously improve products. It is a project that we greatly believe in and has already come a long way. It still requires a lot of work to be able to fully support our team and there is a lot we have learned from its journey so far. The below recording can give you some great insights
- Vision week 2021 - ProductOS from first principles {starts at 13m45s}
If you would like to get more background on Jellyfish, there are more presentations in the Summit 2019 & 2020 folders.
balenaHub
We released balenaHub in November 2020 as an easier way to find and publish apps and projects for edge devices.
- Vision week 2021 - balenaHub from first principles {starts at 10m10s}
There is also a Summit 2020 balenaHub presentation if you would like to see how the idea developed.