Last month WooThemes hosted their annual WooTrip. 16 staff, myself included, jetted in from all over the world (woo span 7 countries now) to meet up in Cape Town, South Africa (headquarters!) for a week of team building.
After a gruelling 11 hour flight from Heathrow (my first time on a plane so it wasn’t a pleasant experience) James, Andrew, Coen, Dan and I landed first in Johannesburg and then transferred to Cape Town on a second 2 hour flight.
Before departure I was hesitant to go to South Africa – I’d heard horror stories about crime etc. When you get to Cape Town one of the first things you see are the slums by the airport, but boy, once you get past all that (around the mountain) Cape Town is simply stunning.
We were staying in a really nice area called Camps Bay with Sea Views out front, and Table Mountain out back. The villa was awesome – a pool, nice rooms and of course an xbox and enough muffins to feed an army.
Although it felt like a holiday, we couldn’t leave all our customers standing! We had many a support sprint to keep on top of things and that wasn’t too bad – its better to do support when you can ask others around you, or have a moan and a joke about certain tickets :p
We had day’s workshop in the office, discussing ways to make Woo better for us and for our customers. This was pretty fun – we all pitched our ideas and I felt this was very productive.
Beyond work we did plenty of activities. Paintball, boat trips, wine-tasting, trips up the mountain, seeing the penguins, surfing, even football in the scorching 30 degree sun.
The food in cape town was a special treat – I’ve never ate so much steak and seafood in the space of a week. It certainly bested pot noodles and beans on toast 🙂
My favorite activity (aside from eating all those steaks) was probably the paintball – nothing beats shooting your co-workers 🙂 Sadly I was the victim of friendly fire however (looking at you Benbow).
It was really great to meet the whole team. We were able to share ideas, brainstorm and bond. For the most part we started off strangers, but by the end of the week it was like a big ninja family.
Special thanks to Adii, Mark, Magnus and Dom for organising everything and making the trip possible. I look forward to seeing what we all do next year (and by then I’m sure the family will be even bigger!).
More on the trip from Woo: http://www.woothemes.com/2012/11/the-wootrip-recap/