Intré Camp 30 January 2024 – Country house La Lodovica

Introduction

Francesco Rigillo, CEO of Intré, started the day with his presentation focused on a business recap, the achievements of 2023, and the goals for 2024.

After Francesco’s presentation, the floor was given to Fabio Ghislandi, who introduced the guests and the new colleague, Simona Zuccoli, who will take on the role of Scrum Master for several Scrum Teams.

Gildonference

The term Gildonference is a fusion of the words Guild and conference. Essentially, it is a mini-conference dedicated to Guilds and represents an important moment for all the people at Intré to share the results and experiences gained in the Guilds that have been active over the past four months.
The following paragraphs summarize the presentations of the Guilds held in the third quarter of 2023.

On the “Guilds” page of our corporate website, you can find summary sheets of these latest Guilds as well as previous ones.
Here is the translation with the HTML formatting preserved:

Gildattilografia

The Guild has set itself the goal of improving people’s productivity through an in-person course aimed at teaching the efficient use of the keyboard, following the principles of touch typing. The participants, guided by Andrea Akhlaghi Farsi, world champion in touch typing, engaged in 14 sessions covering the following topics:

• analysis of their typing method;
• use of the left and right hands;
• basic and advanced exercises (using screen typing);
• dictation transcription and note-taking;
• alternative layouts and other typing methods;
• simulation of a final test.

As an outcome, a podcast episode will be created, which you can find on the Intré YouTube channel.

SostenibilIntré

Is Intré a sustainable company? What can it do to be even more sustainable? During the meetings of this Guild, the group focused on some of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals defined by the UN to:

• understand what the company is currently doing;
• take concrete actions (for example, 70 trees were planted through the Treedom platform, and 3 internal newsletters dedicated to sustainability in general were written and sent to everyone at Intré);
• propose future actions.

During the Intré Camp of January 30, the results of an activity conducted with the company Up2You were presented, related to estimating the carbon footprint from the event. The total CO2 emissions were offset by supporting sustainability projects certified according to the primary international standard (Verified Carbon Standard). The participants were involved in choosing the supported projects because each of us leaves a footprint, and raising awareness about the impact it has is essential.
During the unconference, a session was dedicated to presenting the future sustainability actions that the Guild will propose to Intré.

Product Discovery

The main goal of the Guild was to learn new tools, techniques, and processes that could help people reduce the risk of failure in the development of a digital product.
Thanks to coaching activities by some colleagues, various topics were covered during the meetings: meaning of vision and mission of a company Business Canvas Model, Production Vision Board, UX (User research e Personas), Experience Mapping (Customer Journey Map, Emotional Journey Map), Service Blueprint, Event Storming, Story Mapping, MVP and Impact Mapping.
The outcome of the Guild will involve the publication of an in-depth article on the company blog.

Algorithms and data structures – 1st group

Learning new, more creative and efficient approaches to apply in the daily work of software developers was the main outcome of this Guild, which was divided into two groups. During the meetings, different types of data structures and classes of algorithms (such as graphs and trees) were studied, taken from the book (and from the GitHub repository) “Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures“; on the practical side, the participants engaged in bot programming and optimization challenges as a team on the “Coding Game” platform.
The Guild’s output will be a podcast episode that will be published on the company’s YouTube channel.

Algorithms and data structures – 2nd group

The second group that joined this Guild has, as an outcome, shared an internal repository containing the exercises completed.

Intréding

How does the stock market work? Is it possible to predict its trends? The Guild was created to try to answer these questions using some solutions taken from the world of Artificial Intelligence. To do this, the group learned the basic concepts of finance and how the main Python libraries for handling time series work.
The outcome of the Guild is BullBot, a bot that allows you to calculate real-time stock market predictions for the publicly traded company of your choice, on the dates you prefer. Four different Artificial Intelligence models were used to make the predictions.

Oculus Revenge

This Guild continued the study work started in the previous two Guilds.
The participants consolidated their knowledge on Unity, Oculus and MRTK – an open-source software development kit developed by Microsoft for creating mixed reality and augmented reality software applications – and they created some simple applications to put the learned concepts into practice.
At the unconference of the camp on January 30th, a session was proposed for presenting the application demos.

CodeBingo

As the name suggests, the true goal of this Guild was the development of a Web application for managing the game of Tombola.
During the Guild conference at the camp on 30 January 30th, the mobile application of the game was presented, which allows generating, for each player’s name entered, the number of cards and thus managing an event more efficiently and sustainably.

The Tombola application, used at the Christmas dinner and other events, represents the true outcome of this Guild.

Illustration & Emotion

The first part of this Guild focused on training one’s illustrative and typographic style (digital or analog), while the second part focused on animating the created output. During the meetings, participants have:

• acquired and trained their personal illustrative and lettering style;
• gained a background on different illustrative styles and new trends;
• learned and practiced different coloring techniques;
• learned the basics of animation and explored various techniques;
• learned how illustrations can be applied in different contexts (Web/portfolio, etc.).

As a Guild output, each participant created several original illustrations where the styles and techniques learned during the course were applied.

Skip the Guild

Among the opportunities that Intré offers to people, there is the option of not joining any Guild to focus on individual training paths: “Skip the Guild.” Below, we provide the list of individuals and the results achieved from their own journey.

• Andrea Sironi and Roberto Aceti: creation of an accessible component library, following the guidelines Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG);
• Carlo Ballabio: obtaining the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification;
• Manuel Bonini: completion of the master’s thesis, with a probable defense in March. Good luck Manuel!
• Andrea Giovane: expansion and consolidation of knowledge in developing a Web app with Spring Boot + Angular + Tomcat + BIRT;
• Simone Recupero: obtaining the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification.

For further insights into the history of our Guilds, visit the dedicated page of the company website that contains, for each Guild:

• a descriptive card;
• the link to any artifact (a video, an article, a podcast episode, etc.).

Best Winter Holiday Photo 2023

Given the great success of the summer photography contest, for this January Intré Camp we decided to organize a contest to reward the most beautiful photos taken during the winter holidays. As with the previous one, this competition also had a good number of submitted photos – 24 in total – from which, through a survey open to the entire company, we selected the three most deserving, taken by:

1. Veronica Brosio
2. Marco Ranica
3. Andrea Caglio

Congratulations to Veronica, Marco, and Andrea!

Unconference

Fabio Ghislandi, Executive Agile Coach and partner at Intré, facilitated the marketplace session during which the unconference program is actually created: each participant, armed with post-its, presents their session and places it in one of the time slots allocated in the agenda.
Once the presentations were complete, a few minutes were dedicated to confirming the current setup of the presentations or making changes, adhering to a single rule: only those who request a change, along with the owner of the involved post-it, can make a decision regarding it.

The following paragraphs are dedicated to the summaries of the sessions attended by me and Marta Ghislandi.

• Who Moved My Cheese?
• Potential of AI in 2024
• Walking in the snow without leaving traces
• Scrum Quest
• 10 Proposals for a Sustainable Future

Who Moved My Cheese?

Marco Loregian, through the storytelling of the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson, brought to the attention of the attendees some lessons on adapting to change. Through the metaphor of a maze and the search for cheese, the author illustrates the importance of being flexible, open to change, and ready to adapt to new circumstances. The story, which encourages overcoming resistance to change and seizing the opportunities that come from positive adaptation, offered several points for reflection:

• it is necessary to behave simply, be flexible, and ready to act quickly;
• do not complicate things too much or disorient yourself with worries and fears;
• notice the small signs as soon as they appear to prepare for the big changes that might come;
• if you don’t adapt quickly, you risk failing;
• the most stubborn resistance to change is within us, and nothing can improve until we change;
• the cheese is always available to us, and it can only be achieved by abandoning our fears.

Potential of AI in 2024

During this January Intré Camp, we asked ourselves, among other things, an important question: “What can we do in 2024 with AI?” The answer could be “Anything,” according to the news that daily covers the topic. Andrea Caglio, with his talk, proposed some applications in the field of Machine Learning regarding classification, regression, and reinforcement learning.

Computer vision
Computer Vision is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers and systems to derive meaningful information from digital images, videos, and other visual inputs. Simply put, the goal is to replicate human vision. Andrea showed us examples of Image/Video classification, Image Segmentation, Object Detection, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing, a discipline that combines linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence, deals with the interaction between computers and human language. Focusing on computer programming, it aims to develop the ability to process and analyze large volumes of natural language data. Andrea talked about applications of Question Answering and Sentence Similarity.

Audio
In this field, there are several applications of Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, and Speaker Diarization, which means that given an audio file with multiple people, a transcript is generated specifying the speakers and their lines.

Multimodal
Andrea presented applications such as Image-to-Text (given an image, a description is generated), Visual Question Answering, Image-to-Video, Text-to-Image, Text-to-Video, and – unfortunately – the increasingly widespread Deepfake.

OpenAI
Andrea concluded his interesting talk by discussing the applications of the “OpenAI” world, such as Image generation (give a text, generate an image that describes it), Inpainting (adding an element to an image), Variations (given an image in a certain style, create a variation), all the way to GPTs, which are customized versions of the well-known ChatGPT.

Walking in the snow without leaving traces

Luca Parsani, cybersecurity engineer for Betrusted, gave a talk on the topic of privacy management, specifically how to behave in order to maximize one’s online privacy. Starting with the premise that each of us has already left a “digital footprint,” a series of personal data that we publish, for example, on social media, Luca listed a series of small tips that can be adopted to navigate more discreetly, accompanied by a rationale and an explanation of the mechanisms behind them.
To summarize:

• ensure that the websites visited support the HTTPS protocol, which allows encrypted transmissions;
• reject non-essential cookies to prevent our data from being used for marketing purposes;
• which software to use if you want to take security to the next level.

Luca’s talk sparked a dialogue and the listeners felt engaged, turning it into a mutual exchange of ideas and opinions.

Scrum Quest

Scrum Quest is the board game created by the “i3 Board Game” Guild in the second semester of 2023. The goal was to design a complete game that illustrates the principles of an Agile framework (Scrum) in an engaging and fun way. The design process was lengthy and included the following activities: brainstorming, prototyping, playtesting, and gathering feedback to improve the game.
Already tested at one of our internal events called “Monza Learn & Fun,” Scrum Quest featured two engaging sessions. The game is still in the prototype/MVP phase, but the intention is to continue its development due to the benefits experienced by the players.

10 Proposals for a Sustainable Future

The participants of the SostenibilIntré Guild presented the work done during the four months of collaboration. The presentation highlighted the concrete actions taken by the Guild and the 10 proposals developed for a better future.
The initiatives carried out and completed by the Guild were:

• launch of the Intré forest on the Treedom platform;
• calculation of emissions and the corresponding offset of the Camp in collaboration with the company Up2You;
• calculation of emissions generated by remote Guild meetings and how many would have been in person;
• purchase of 9 books on topics of economic, social, and environmental sustainability, available in the offices for all collaborators;
• calculation of the average annual personal impact of people at Intré;
• sending of three internal newsletters on sustainability topics;
• support for starting a collaboration with a higher technical institute to offer quality education outside of Intré.

In the second part of the session, the 10 proposals to be presented to the company’s coordination were introduced. We hope to be able to share them soon.

Conclusion

After the last track of sessions at the unconference, we gathered in the main hall to close the day of this January camp, but not before voting on:

• the best Guild presentation;
• the best talk of the unconference.

The award for the best presentation during the Guild Conference went to the participants of the SostenibilIntré Guild, while Francesco Sacchi and Marco Loregian shared the award for the best unconference sessions.

After exchanging the final thoughts, it was time to say goodbye and look forward to the next Intré Camp, which will be a two-day event to celebrate the first 25 years of Intré!