I’ve always been blown away by the talented people I work with here at Bekk. If I’m ever stuck with some coding challenge, I can always count on receiving a thorough explanation within minutes on our company chat. At every one of our three yearly company gatherings, I’m blown away by the all-Bekk speaker roster, incredible creativity and seamless execution.
We have been a very visible company at conferences all over the world, with talks about everything from Elm to Continuous Design ??. We got this blog, of course, where we share stuff like weekly React newsletters and how you can battle that pesky performance anxiety ?. We’ve made art, designed awards, and won them, too.
I invited all of my colleagues to join me in spreading the love and show that our culture of sharing is infused in the DNA of our company — and the response was nothing short of extraordinary.
We’re incredibly excited, scared, and downright proud to introduce not just one or two, or four, but twelve different Christmas calendars, each covering a topic we’re really, really passionate about.
Twelve different Christmas calendars, each covering a topic we’re really, really passionate about
☁️ Cloud Computing at thecloud.christmas
The rapid evolvement and widespread adoption of the public cloud has made a grand impact on how we write code, how we architect our systems, and even how we think about process. At Bekk we’ve been working with the three major providers for a number of years (sorry, Alibaba Cloud). In this 24-part blog extravaganza we will share some of our knowledge, thoughts and failures! I hope you’re as enthusiastic reading them as we are writing them!
?? CSS at css.christmas
CSS is becoming more fun every day. New features are added, and browsers are becoming more standards compliant, too! This makes it such a pleasure to work with styling web sites these days. This article will focus on tips and tricks to improve your CSS workflow, and make even nicer looking sites!
➡️ Functional Programming at functional.christmas
FP is the hottest programming paradigm right now, and it’s probably thanks to languages like F#, Kotlin and Elm making it more accessible. We’ve been nerding out over functional programming for ages in Bekk, and we have a lot of cool articles for you to nerd out to, too.
☕️ Java at java.christmas
Bekk has been working on some of the heaviest Java backends our country has to offer. That means we’ve seen some things, and learned a bit as well. This calendar will give you 24 ways to improve your Java-fu in 24 days.
? JavaScript at javascript.christmas
JavaScript is the most popular language in the world right now, and for good reason. It’s fun, weird and fantastic — all at the same time. This calendar contains a lot of cool tips, and even a few interviews!
? Kotlin at kotlin.christmas
After Kotlin blew up in 2017, we’ve been using this amazing programming language extensively on a lot of projects. Some places, we even started migrating old Java-code to Kotlin! This calendar is written by some of the greatest Kotlin-programmers in Norway — you have a lot to look forward to!
? Machine Learning at ml.christmas
Each day until Christmas we will give you a brief introduction into a topic related to the exciting field of machine learning and data science. Although there will be some deep dives into statistics and mathematics, everyone should be able to understand the content of this calendar. Whether you are an experienced data scientist, an aspiring novice or just curious about data science — this is the Christmas calendar for you.
? Open Source at opensource.christmas
We use open source software every single day. A lot of us even contribute back, with bug fixes, documentation tweaks, or even brand new features! This Christmas calendar will be all about open source software, and the lessons we’ve learnt being a part of that for the last two decades.
? Product Development at product.christmas (in Norwegian)
This one is a bit different. It’s 24 podcast episodes — in Norwegian — about how we do product development here at Bekk. I sure hope you speak Norwegian, because the content is just amazing!
Available, of course, in your favorite podcast app. Just search for “Kaffeprat hos Bekk”
⚛️ React at react.christmas
React is more popular than ever, and — thanks to the innovations of the React team — more capable as well. We’ve written hundreds of React apps the last couple of years, and we dare say we know a thing or to about how to do it right. Look forward to 24 amazing articles in quick succession.
? Security at security.christmas
A lot of our clients are government agencies, or huge financial organizations. Knowing how to secure their information is critical! Luckily, Bekk has a solid team of security experts that are looking forward to share their knowledge with you for a second consecutive year!
?? User Experience at ux.christmas (partly in Norwegian)
What can one expect from a UX advent calendar from Bekk? UX.christmas is a collaborative project where 24 writers have written as many articles, full of industry-relevant tidbits. The “windows” of this advent calendar cover a variety of topics like creativity, storytelling, and product development. Everything from variable fonts and dark patterns (on Friday the 13th of course ?) to hypothesis testing and digital accessibility.
Each of these lovely web sites will share a new article every day from December 1st through December 24th. If everything goes well, we’ll have created 288 articles about technology, design and innovation. In 24 days.
If you’re looking for a daily overview, you can find that at bekk.christmas.
We’re far from the first ones to create an IT-related Christmas calendar. Advent of Code is a huge international success. In Norway, knowit and others has been doing a great job for years.
The Bekk Christmas calendar adventure started in 2017, where I bought the domain name React.Christmas on a whim.
Next year, I got a few of my colleagues to join me in a repeat effort. We wrote a blog post about the entire experience, but long story short, we ended up writing 96 blog posts about React, Elm, JavaScript and IT security.
This year, we wanted to show off an even wider variety of the incredible people we work with. For those of you who don’t know Bekk, we’re a company of ~450 people, specializing in technology, design and business management. That’s a lot of knowledge not covered by front-end technology and a security calendar!
To kick us off, Erik Mathisen— our resident copywriter — held an amazing course in how to write well and to keep it short. A lot of the people that signed up as authors (there’s over a 100 of us! ?) had no previous experience writing articles like these — so we had a lot of learning to do.
We even live-streamed the talks we held on Twitch to our Trondheim, Norway office — which is also joining the fun!
The artwork featured in our calendars are definitely one of a kind. Well, it’s actually 288 different one of a kinds. Our resident crazy generative artist Kjetil Golid went all out for us, generating a unique piece of art for every day of every calendar. The algorithms are implemented in JavaScript, and based on different Bekk-esque color schemes, and are just amazing.
You can see more of his artwork on Instagram.