On Tuesday, our office hosted the Triangle JavaScript Monthly Meetup. If you live in RDU, follow @trianglejs for the latest information. This is the second meetup that we’ve hosted, and both have been well attended and really fun!

We’ve seen a lot of great things happen in our office over the last year and these have allowed us to have more events. (We’re hoping to have even more in the future). The first was getting a larger office space, with plenty of open area for collaborative discussions. Recently, we’ve also gotten a bunch of new toys (I mean equipment), like a 60″ TV that we use for group code reviews and presentations. Best of all, we now have an Office Admin, Amanda, who helps us stay organized and plan events.

If you checked out the Meetup page, you’ll see that there were talks on Coffeescript and Node.js, which we use in AgileZen. Nate, Ryan, and Justin were able to not only talk about these technologies, but also demo some really cool apps that they’ve been working on as part of Freeform Fridays.

Freeform Friday is a program we implemented a few months back and it’s been a really successful experiment so far. Because our team values innovation, we’ve built time into our process for intrapreneurship, not only to promote the personal development of our team members, but because of the potential for ideas that improve the product. You’ve probably heard of similar programs at organizations like 3M and Google and hacking on Fridays is our version. Rally was already doing “Hack-a-thons” well before we were acquired, which were typically the week after an 8-week iteration. We decided to do our hack time on Fridays, since it made the most sense with our continuous flow process.

Over the next few weeks, members of the team will be blogging about their Freeform projects, so stay tuned!