If you’d stop by Mistral, any time during the past years, it’s likely you’d see at least one group event happening. We literally had 2-5 different events daily. Some exclusive and small scale, some casual and random, and some official and grande.
Professional development comes in all shapes and sizes. Organizing internal or external events is a chance to gather around in our physical or virtual space, learn something new, share experiences, and at times – even get out of our comfort zones.
Getting inspired by true stories and experiences is golden.
During these unusual times of uncertainty and (almost) full remote, we simply rearranged our events to fit everyone. Lunch and Learn became Watch and Learn, Brunch and Company updates became Coffee with the founders and so on.
However, some new event concepts came to life like Break the Week. The goal behind Break the Week sessions is to provide a new perspective on a certain topic. We try to summon the brightest minds available to be guest lecturers and freshen things up.
Who doesn’t like meeting new interesting people? And what a crew of fantastic people we hosted in our virtual home, in the past few weeks.
Let us give you an overview on some of our past Break the Week guests.
Saldina Nurak: A Young Woman with a Mission
Taking a momentum of YouTube’s popularity, she decided to use a pandemic based quarantine to run a personal project. And did she succeed! Saldina is a full-time frontend developer and a pioneer female tech vlogger in the region. She told us about her work behind Youtube channel Code Beauty, where she creates free coding lessons. Encouraging people to enter the IT industry by creating equal opportunities for all is her main agenda. Check out her channel Code Beauty here: https://bit.ly/2BxIj7A
Maja Hadžiselimović: Neverending Thrill for Knowledge (and Robots)
Maja is a robotics engineer, with academic experience from Universities of Sarajevo, Maribor, and Novi Sad. As a committed advocate for involving girls and women in the STEM field, she joined IT Girls BiH initiative. Currently, she works in Augsburg on the development of the first European industrial exoskeleton. She is the national coordinator for European Robotics Week. (which BiH is hosting this year!) As our guest, she took us through bits and pieces of her current project and showcased the potential of innovation through robotics.
Una Mesić: Kindness beyond Words
Every child deserves to grow up with love, respect, and security. This is the main mission behind one of our favorite organizations – SOS Children’s Villages – SOS Kinderdorf International. Their representative Una, shared a story of their beneficiaries and how impactful an individual effort can really be. Una further talked about the infrastructure and the broad spectrum of activities they do (Educational Programmes, Health Centres, Schools, and many other community-based activities). See how you can join in their efforts here: https://www.sos-ds.ba/
Haris Hadžić (SpaceLufter): Coding Music as a Hobby
We had a live music performance by Haris, more popular as SpaceLufter. This multitalented backend developer (10 years of experience!) is one of the few people in BiH and the SEE region who creates music by coding. Hearing about this new global trend left us inspired to experiment with #SonicPi (a live coding environment), and see the new fun perspective in Ruby on Rails. His mission? Very patriotic one: Gathering more people around his peculiar hobby while proving that even a small country like ours can produce valuable art, music, and innovation. Check out the sound of his code here: soundcloud.com/space-lufter
Aleksandar Mastilović: Breaking Myths through Facts
An engineer, a scientist, and a person with a passion for IoT – Aleksandar Mastilović was a perfect choice to talk with about the buzz around 5G/6G network. He held an interesting session on 5G/ 6G network in the context of software development. As IoT based projects are evolving each day, and market needs grow, he emphasized the importance for constant skills growth for developers and the IT industry. Find his latest blog here: https://aleksandarmastilovic.com/blog/
A big thank you goes to all our speakers for giving us the biggest gifts of all – their time and knowledge. As we like to nurture long term relations and friendships, be sure you’ll hear more about these fantastic people through our platforms. If you have somebody awesome to recommend for some of our next Break the Week sessions, make sure to let us know!