Throwback to our spring event 2025
Our team has grown considerably in the last two years, from 30 to 45 people.
A team doesn’t develop through day-to-day project work alone; it also needs time for joint activities. In today’s world of remote working and working from different locations, spending time together outside of project work is all the more critical. These moments allow us to meet, learn from each other, and grow together. We particularly want to enable our new team members to get to know each other personally and promote their integration into the team, even across different locations. At this year’s spring event, most of our employees from our three locations — Hamburg, Cologne, and Karlsruhe — came together in Hamburg for two days to discuss technical and internal topics in depth.
The growth of our company is reflected not only in the number of participants but also in the variety of topics, perspectives, and discussions. This makes our company events exciting: they provide an opportunity to come together as a team outside the daily project routine and exchange ideas directly, regardless of location or work topic.
We caught up with familiar faces, met new colleagues, discussed future topics, shared knowledge and sprayed a couple of walls along the way.
After the employees from Karlsruhe and Cologne arrived on Wednesday afternoon, the event began with a reunion or a first meeting. Meeting people from other locations in person after only knowing them virtually was a nice change of pace.
The event’s first session began with a presentation by our Managing Director, who presented the big picture of scieneers as a company. We then discussed future internal topics together.
A little game was played over the two days to help everyone get to know each other better. Each person drew a slip of paper with three statements and had to find out who it belonged to throughout the event.
Next, we shared the results of our annual employee survey, followed by a presentation on the criteria for fair and transparent performance reviews in yearly appraisals.
After a coffee break, we continued with the programme. Both days featured engaging sessions in two parallel streams on data science, data engineering, and product management.
Attendees could choose from various internal and technical topics, including feedback culture, our project rating framework, and an easy-to-understand glossary of product management terms and concepts.
Auch technisch wurde es vielfältig. Es gab viele interessante Vorträge zu verschiedenen Themen und ausreichend Raum für Fragen und Diskussionen:
- The development and challenges of an autonomous job application agent interacting with the browser, including a live demo
- Deployment of Fabric Workspaces via Azure DevOps
- A comparison of the basic concepts and services of Azure, AWS, and GCP, highlighting their differences
- LLMs for non-data scientists: introduction, current capabilities and limitations, fields of application, and agents, reasoning
- MCP from Anthropic: a new standard for LLM tool connection, and how LLM tools can be meaningfully connected
- Best Practices for Data Science: UV for Python repos and a general outlook
Thanks to these informative sessions, everyone could deepen their knowledge in their specialist area or learn something new, depending on their interests.
The first day of the event ended with a company dinner at a restaurant, where all the employees could chat in a relaxed atmosphere and finish off the day.
The second day began with a creative start, with the artistic highlight of our event: a graffiti workshop held beside the Hamburg Street Art School. Everyone had the opportunity to use a spray can to express their creativity on the wall.
First, we learnt the basic graffiti techniques and practised them individually. Then, we designed a huge, colourful graffiti mural together as a team.
After the workshop, the sessions continued. There were technical topics, but also topics that are meaningful and relevant to the company. One such topic was raising awareness of discrimination, which impressed many employees and gave them the knowledge to actively promote diversity within the team and working environment.
The presentation opened many people’s eyes. The topic was conveyed vividly using examples and tools to combat discrimination in various situations and from different, often overlooked, perspectives. Afterwards, interested participants could apply what they had learned from the session directly in a roleplay.
At the end of each session, all employee could share their thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about the company, the event, and anything else they wished to discuss during an open feedback session.
We resolved our little get-to-know-each-other game at the end of our spring event. We were able to confirm our guesses about the people on our slips of paper and discover interesting facts about the other team members.
We can reflect on two days that brought us closer as a team, strengthening our bonds through personal interaction, shared learning from each other, and collaborative creativity.
Thank you to all the participants who attended, contributed, listened, discussed and helped shape the event. We are already looking forward to the next event in September, which will take place in Karlsruhe!