We learned during COVID that remote work opens new possibilities for teams and projects, especially for nonprofits like App Dev for All that need to find the best talent in unexpected places. Today, my team includes engineers from the US, Canada, Ecuador, Nigeria, India, and the Philippines.
We’ve been working well asynchronously, but we wondered if we could do better. Could we build a deeper mutual understanding that would help us work more effectively as a team? With the first major release of our Android app only a few months away, we needed to align our distributed team and make sure we were all working toward the same goal.
Our leadership team decided the best way to do that was through a company retreat. With teammates coming from six countries, our first challenge was finding a host location that everyone could enter without visa issues. After some research, we discovered several vacation islands that would work—and we ultimately chose Curaçao.
We divided the retreat into two halves. The first followed a traditional agenda; the second was a free-form hackathon (which I’ll write more about later).
We opened with David Schachter, our founder and executive director, reminding us of the vision behind the project and why we’re building this app. He also laid out the roadmap for upcoming releases, clearly defining which features belong in which version. He closed by highlighting our advantages over commercially developed IDEs and how we can leverage them to delight our users.
Next came a brainstorming session on adding scripting support to Code on the Go, followed by a code-kata style exercise in test-driven development (TDD). We split into three teams and built a trivia game using the classic cycle: red (failing test) → green (passing test) → refactor. What sounded like a dry exercise turned into a lot of fun—and to our surprise, the teams made more progress than expected, proving the power of TDD.
At App Dev for All, one of our biggest strengths is that we can stay laser-focused on delighting users. We don’t have investors pushing us toward vanity features or bloat. That freedom opened the door to discussions about meaningful features already in the pipeline, as well as a brainstorming session on potential “Wow!” features—ideas so bold they could surprise people simply by existing. Many of these centered on making it easier for users to bring their own ideas into our app, through creative mobile-first tools that embody the spirit of “necessity is the mother of invention.”
Another critical discussion focused on distribution. Our ultimate goal is to reach the two billion people with Android phones who don’t have constant, low-cost, high-speed internet. Reaching them isn’t trivial, nor is holding their attention once we do. We explored strategies, weighed trade-offs, and came away with a prioritized plan for evaluating our options.
The retreat was a success far beyond my expectations. I left with a deeper sense of connection to my teammates, and I know others felt the same. It was energizing to spend time with so many passionate, hard-working people, all united around the same vision.
