They say, “the greater the distance – the lesser the force of attraction.” (Sir Isaac Newton, I beg your pardon).  And here at Atwix, we used to have a pretty reliable formula for keeping remote teams “close.”

Each year – at least once a year – all Atwixers come together in one travel destination for a weekend of in-person connection, relaxation, and team-building. Welcome to the Atwix offsite.

It’s time to take a fresh look at your approach to eCommerce. Learn how the Atwix Performance Audit for the Adobe (Magento) Commerce platform helps you stay attuned to your evolving business needs and goals. 

Sometimes I ask myself, what defines a moment? What happens when the novelty of something that was “new” wears off and becomes customary? Many of us are probably already past the strategy of waiting out the crisis and have lost hope that we will wake up to find out the the last six months was nothing but a bad dream. Perhaps it’s worth dropping the “new” from the “new normal” now?

Proximity has always been at a core of our Atwix culture. Of course, we’re a digital business and we build digital experiences for our clients worldwide, so we always focused on that digital kind of proximity – working very closely with our clients, partners and community, being available and approachable.

A retrospective meeting is an important part of the Agile Software Development. It does not matter whether your team uses Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall etc., or has no formalized management framework at all. It also doesn’t matter whether you have a formalized development sprint or not. What really important is to analyze your team’s progress, successes and mistakes, and then develop the team based on that information. The place and time for that is a retrospective meeting. Let’s find out how to prepare an awesome retrospective meeting.

Usually you don’t jump on a plane with your friends and go to Asia to have some great weeks of living, working and traveling in the region. It was my first time of working from this far: a 6-hour time difference with our Ukrainian office, tropical climate and a whole bunch of other differences like food, traffic, religion etc.

What does 2018 have in store when it comes to security? Nothing very promising. The year has just begun and we already have some major security issues affecting Intel and AMD processors. The trend begins with WannaCry in 2017, latest issues with macOS and a whole bunch of different security breaches. And it will continue to persist as our society evolves and becomes more and more digital.

20th of November, 2017, has marked an important date in Atwix history – we turned seven. It has always been a dilemma of what to do for the birthday celebration and we often followed a default and obvious way – making a party. This time though, we thought – what if?

Atwix is a distributed company. But once a year we break all our rules… Well, almost all :). For the whole year Atwix heroes work hard and from anywhere they want, except during one summer weekend when we all take a break together at the annual offsite meeting. This is an informal event that brings all our teammates, no matter where they are located, together for a long weekend – to spend time together and communicate face-to-face. Last year we had a pilot offsite, and since then we are committed to doing it annually.

This year, we wanted to improve our experience, and came up with some basic principles for holding a successful offsite.

An office manager is an obvious hire for any company. The very definition of an office manager implies that there needs to be an office. Thus if you have one, after reaching a certain size there is no question whether you need a person, who provides day-to-day comfort and maintenance of the working environment. But when it comes to remote or distributed companies, the question is not that easy to answer. And since Atwix is a distributed company with both remote-only and in-office employees, we decided to share our experience with having an office manager, who manages more than just a physical office. This is what we are going to learn from Ksenia, our office manager.