Wishing all our readers and customers a hopeful, happy year ahead. But even as we look ahead, we cannot help but look back at December 2018, which was good business-wise but even better for the team as a whole. Here’s a quick wrap:
1. Beginning of the Book Reading Club
Earlier in 2018, we had started building the Tyche bookshelf, which was a mix of fiction, business and motivational reads, such as Shoe Dog, Vivekananda and The Karachi Deception. As is with books, one thing led to another and the first week of December saw us hosting our first ever book reading club, in a team where only five out of 17 members had any degree of a reading habit. The book was selected by vote, and Marshall Goodman’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There was chosen.
The first session, as all firsts are, was a little rough on the edges. Those working remotely could not properly participate and the anticipated two hours turned into nearly three, but it had set the wheels in motion.
Volunteers read the first few pages of the book, while members raised questions on words and sentences they did not completely understand an also on what the author was trying to convey. There were discussions where members shared their own life experiences, with respect to workplace behavior. All in all, it was a rewarding session. This was followed by one more session towards the end of the month, which went from discussing leadership to revealing tales of our grandmother, to issues of everyday sexism in India. While often wavering off the topic, it was also highly engaging and participatory. We all look forward to see where this practice takes us.
2. The Big Reveal
There was no midnight mass or a fancy Christmas tree, but the Tyche team was celebrating the festival and the holidays in its own way. The Secret Santa at office turned into a tough game of guesswork and headscratching as everyone scrambled to get the most appropriate gift and be the best Santa. A wooden desk organizer, bags, clutches, perfumes, fisheye lens, earphones, cosmetics, wallets – there were gifts of all kinds. But the best gift was the joy on the faces of every member, mine included, at the curiosity of what we have received and then figuring out who gave it to us! Here are some pictures from the same:
3. The Online Courses
During the Black Friday sale of 2018, we had purchased several courses for the development of our team, ranging from ES6, React for Beginners, Sublime Text Power User to non-tech topics such as French for Beginners, Effective Time Management and Facebook Ads 101. While some have dropped out of the course, most have stuck to it and made good progress on their chosen courses.
Says Apeksha who has completed the course on Manual Software Testing With Bug Reporting Tool ALM/QC, “I have done one online course before and found it very helpful. This time I thought I should strengthen my testing skills, now that I am the lead tester. My key takeaway was that in any plugin, if we describe a value, I would usually not test the minimum and maximum values. This is something I learnt during the course and will be using it going forward. I am sure now I will keep looking for courses to follow too.”
Our developer Kartik had taken up the course Ultimate WordPress Plugin and is halfway through it. “I took up the course to brush up the basics, so that I can re-affirm my own methods that I have followed so far. I learnt how the code can be a little more organised for the developer himself to find later on.”
Dhara, who has completed two courses and is halfway through the third, which include Writing Better Emails, Productivity Hacks for Writers and Effective Time Management says, “I did not get lazy during the courses as they were well-timed and easy to understand. The course which has most helped me is Effective Time Management, with respect to solving support tickets. It taught me how I can prioritize tickets based on how much time each ticket would take and whom to reply first to. It’s left me with more time to write blogs, keeping myself abreast with what’s happening and other small tasks.”.
On the sales front, we have grown very well and are thankful to all our customers for continuing to support us. On the plugin front, there were no updates or fixes owing to the holiday season. We promise to keep working hard on existing products and introducing new ones so we may help as many store owners as possible.
Happy 2019 everyone!
