The regular readers of our blog will have noticed a few off-topic posts slipping in from time to time. The common theme is coffee and beer . As a group of passionate computer programmers and tech geeks it’s no surprise that we have developed a strong corporate coffee culture. Coffee is our secret weapon! Over the past 10 years we’ve changed programming languages, compilers, and development practices, but one factor has remained constant: Coffee. It must be the pillar for PaperCut’s success.
Coffee is very much part of our culture. The company funds a continuous flow of lattes, cappuccinos and macchiatos (Hendrik’s favorite) all arriving from the coffee shop directly opposite the office. Most of us have espresso machines at home (e.g. Rancilio Silva ) and discussions on brewing techniques seem to pop up in developer meeting agendas unannounced.
Recently management decided that attending a formal coffee barista course would be a good idea. Traditional businesses would have called this a “cooperate team building exercise”, however for us it’s “core competency training” :-) The whole Melbourne development team (minus Tom) spent a day at a coffee training academy learning the finer points of coffee production.
Lessons included:
- The art of wasting lots of milk perfecting the perfect froth.
- The amount of coffee one must waste to calibrate the ideal 25 second espresso pour.
- Latte art : The art of convincing someone that the shape on the top of their coffee was deliberate.
- How to make beverages unknown to computer programmers (chai lattes, and hot chocolates)
The day finished off with a competition. We paired up into teams and had to make 8 coffee variants in 8 minutes. Congratulations to Matt and Jason who took out the title.
To take a slight deviation, my favorite pieces of coffee trivia:
- The
magic number
on Java
.classfiles is0xCAFEBABE - The embedded framework we target for our HP embedded MFP development is called Chai
Overall it was a very fun day. We even got to walk away with a formal certificate - we’re now qualified Baristas! If we all get sick of writing print management software we now at least have a fall back option - open a cafe!
