The first day I arrived was a Monday afternoon. I was greeted by a big sign asking you to take off your shoes. I felt like I was entering a Japanese restaurant.

The unit was the size of a basketball court inside an industrial building. Two long rows of desks were in the open office space. Meetings rooms, washrooms, and other functional rooms were on the side.

Athena, who coordinated with me, showed me a special white desk that I could use for the day.

It’s their usual coffee, snacks, and random stuff table. I have no problems working with that.

1pm. Easing In

I was feeling kinda awkward as a stranger who just sat down to work without people knowing why I was here. So I started walking carefully and greeting old friends I saw in the office because I was worried to disturb the people I didn’t know.

I remembered how my friends told me they got an offer from this company when we graduated from the same university five years ago. They are still here today.

After a while, I settled at my desk and got into the zone.

It didn’t seem like I’ve disturbed them at all. People kept talking, keyboards kept clicking, headphones kept playing. No one seemed to freak out because I was here, I think.

2pm. Story Time

After a bit of work, I asked if I could talk to someone and got introduced to Ten, a growth hacker for the company’s in-house product, Skygear.

She told me that the project actually began two years ago as a backend for internal use to help the company’s developers save time. Later, they decided to fully open-source it on Github to make it available for the developer community. For those of you who’ve heard of BaaS, it’s like Firebase by Google, or Parse by Facebook.

She knew I was interested in developer tools, so she asked for my feedback. In addition to giving my initial impressions, I drilled down into their development process and asked why they made certain product decisions. She had no problem sharing. For example, even though open-sourcing made Skygear harder to control and monetize, the company believed it was more important to enable the developer community to customize, contribute, and self-host on their own servers.

There was a lot of idea sharing. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why they offered a desk for free — to gather ad hoc feedback about products. I’m also really impressed with their take because they are almost sacrificing business for being community and developer-friendly. This is a story of David vs many Goliaths.

3pm. Coffee Break

Preparing coffee with a Chemex

The company also has a “part-time barista” who prepares coffee when she’s onsite.



All the coffee lovers came over. They waited, talked, laughed without reserve. Their discussion ranged from their current projects to politics.

Most company might have instant or capsule coffee machines, but pour-over is only for the serious. You need to measure the exact grind amount, water, and the temperature. People shared beans they bought from around the world. Apparently, the CTO once proposed opening a cafe instead that only served developers.

4pm. Work Hour

After the coffee break, I went back to check off a few more tasks. One random visitor sat down with me.

His name is “花生” (“Faseng”, means peanut, like the colour of his fur).

There were four cats in the company (Chima, Faseng, Milk Tea and Coffee). Frank, the company’s lead designer, made the latest company T-shirt with their avatars.

5pm. Bug Investigation

I overheard an engineer sitting beside me muttering about an issue on an iPhone app they were developing. He noticed I was looking over, and openly invited me to join the discussion.



We went through the issue together, started the debugger, added some logs, killed the process, and repeated. After several attempts, we were able to conclude that two issues were happening:

The debugger was failing. We had to use logs manually. Xcode version freaking 8, seriously?! The app fell into a strange state where the network request could come back without a response nor an error.

It was fun and fulfilling to be able to participate in some problem-solving investigation, where I learned something new too.

6pm. Happy Hour

A few people started gathering around a small area of the company. Rick invited me to join them and proudly pointed to his cabinet of alcohol. There were lots of different kinds — Whiskey, red wine, Japanese sake, and bottles I couldn’t name.

Normally office workers would be leaving for dinner around 7. But surprisingly some Oursky members stayed back and started hitting the keyboard again! I remembered Rick saying “Alcohol boosts productivity!”. Turns out, he was not kidding.

People seemed to enjoy their wine as much as their work.

9pm. Wrapping Up

I worked past 8 that day. My coordinator had already left, but no one was pushing me to leave.

Everyone had been friendly and casual, and I enjoyed my stay overall — the coffee break, the random discussions, the knowledge exchanges, and the observation on how the team worked together, etc.