Feedback! comes in all types and colors, a very trendy word nowadays in the workplace. In the end, who does not like feedback, right? I have heard gazillion times people saying: “I love feedback” “feedback is my breakfast” or “feedback is always good” and preaching about how feedback is beneficial and how open they are to receive it. The reality is that knowing about feedback and all its benefits does not make you good at delivering it and most importantly does not mean you know how to handle r
Students about to graduate from high school are often overwhelmed regarding their career choices. For many, the world of work is a black box that is difficult to grasp. You often hear young people say "Something to do with the Internet" when asked what they would like to do in their future. That's why the „Abitur“ students of the Kant-Gymnasium in Berlin-Lichtenberg were given the opportunity to get to know a „internet company“ at close hand and gain authentic impressions. On February 10, about
CoFa does Pen&Paper RPGs! You might have heard of pen and paper or table-top role-playing games – Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu are just some of the many different rule systems out there. If those still don’t ring a bell – imagine improvisational theatre, where everyone role-plays a certain character in a make-believe world and creates a story together as a group. The rule-systems mentioned before are just rough guidelines to the setting and what dice to roll to
During our four days Hackathon at DKB Code Factory, we enabled our employees to work on topics of interest which improve our daily workaround. During this focus time, the teams of up to 10 people (Frontend, Backend, UX/Ui Design, Product, Testing and Research) worked together on different projects from interactive room booking maps to an own digital expenses app and new ways of implementation and scripts. Insights of project Expensum Our aim was to built a great application to hand in expense
Where does the phrase ‘sitting in an ivory tower’ come from and why is the personnel department often associated with this negative connotation? But more importantly, what can we as HR professionals do to avoid appearing to be sitting in an ivory tower? It seems that the French literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, in the course of an intellectual controversy with the poet Alfred de Vigny in the middle of the 19th century, wanted to express that de Vignys’ thoughts were unworldly and f
Imagine sitting at your desk in the office, probably obviously working, and a colleague wants you to join him for a meeting in one of the rooms to discuss the next feature you’ll be working on. So, you get up, walk over to the room, make yourself comfortable, open your laptops and are just about to start but then… Thunder rolls, lights flash and a group of co-workers walk in with the phrase ‘Oh, I’m afraid you’ll have to go elsewhere, we’ve booked this room.’ Already in a somewhat sour mood, yo
When Apple's WWDC 2022 took place and the Code Factory was there - at least remotely. Our iOS Squad took two days to take a closer look at the innovations for Apple's various operating systems, but especially for iOS. We booked rooms in FS200, short for Friedrichstr. 200, our main office, and watched the videos of the Apple developers during the two days. We combined the whole event with a kind of "mini-hackathon" to refactor existing code components. In consultation with the product owners, w
In the season when days are shorter than nights, autumn covered the streets of Berlin with a blanket of the fallen leaves, one can choose different ways to keep themselves cosy and warm and what can be better than a good wine in a good company! So, some twenty of us at CoFa signed up for a fun evening of wine tasting at 8greenbottles in the heart of Kreuzberg. Whether it’s a stroll along Kottbusser Damm or Landwehrkanal, all the ways to our wine tasting spot lead us through one of the most pict
On June 8th this year, Summer starts with a field adventure to one of the iconic places in Berlin: the historic Tempelhof Airport. Some of us start the trip from the office, and like happy school children, we get on the U7 train to our destination. When we arrived at the building's entrance, we were full of energy and excitement, partly from the bright afternoon sun and partly from meeting in real life. The front of the Tempelhof Airport is breathtaking, with a vast parking lot that matches the
At Code Factory, we love to meet & mingle! As we spend lots of time with people from work, we want to get to know them also in a casual way. This is why we have a social committee: a group of employees who organize monthly activities for the whole company. Every 2nd week, we meet to discuss upcoming plans and ideas for the next months. The Committee of 2022 are: Maria, Luise, Milan, Roman, Indra, Leonard and Anja. All of our ideas are collected in a top secret miro board, and boy, we have tons
Scrum The Scrum framework provides structure to incrementally deliver value and periodically evaluate the teams processes. Developers, Product Owner, and others attend regular Scrum events to reduce ad hoc meetings. The Developers try to finish a finite number of tasks in a fixed time scope called Sprint. Once per cycle everyone joins the Planning to prepare tasks for the upcoming Sprint. With the same frequency the team meets up for the Retrospective, where they discuss potential process and