At 10up, where I work, teams are called pods and the pod that I belong to is called Voltron. Voltron recently had its pod meetup in Toronto, and I helped organize the events of the visit of around seven people coming from various parts of the world.

I am hoping that for our next meetup in about a year we will go somewhere a bit more exciting for me, but that remains to be seen.

I can definitely say that helping organize such an event was outside of my normal skill set and I found it a bit uncomfortable to do, but I’d like to think that things all worked out well. It helped that most of the time everyone was around, we were attending WordCamp Toronto, an event focused on the software that 10up uses to power the websites it develops and supports.

It also helped that my wife came to the weekend events, and it meant that our team had a second vehicle (a co-worker drove up from New York) and that I had an expert on Toronto available, since Georgetown is not Toronto.

I really enjoyed meeting all the people I work with on a daily basis in person, and learning more about who they are as people. It is amazing how little social interaction we had before the pod meetup. Since then, we seem to all be communicating a bit more effectively, and socializing a bit more here and there, though it is hard to keep up the momentum from the meetup.

One thing of note was that the first day we were to get together was on my 32nd birthday, on November 14th. I hadn’t really brought it up as I don’t get too excited about my birthdays, so it was really awesome that my boss brought out a cake at Swiss Chalet for us all to enjoy. It was awesome to celebrate with my wife and co-workers.

On Monday, the 17th of November, we went to the ROM, did a brewery tour, went through PATH to the Eaton Centre, ate at some nice restaurants and capped it all off with a visit to the CN Tower, where we ate in the 360 restaurant and stood on the glass floor.

Once home from the events of the long weekend of socializing, I quickly wrote up everything from the event and posted it to our company’s internal blog, crafting the longest blog post about any pod’s meetup thus far, and probably including the most pictures as well, something I’m extremely proud of.

I really enjoyed myself, and can’t express how much I appreciated 10up footing the bill for me to really interact with my team.

Did I mention that we are hiring?