Well the birds are singing, the flowers are in full bloom and Berlin has just about recovered from the serious amounts of eating, drinking and dancing that took place at Karneval der Kulturen this weekend.

So now seems like the perfect time to announce our venue location for this Summer. We have partnered with Wooga and will be hosted at their offices in Berlin! If we had written a secret wishlist of everything we wanted for our next Hackership space, it would have looked just like what the awesome folks at Wooga are providing. Really!

For 9 weeks, this Summer, we will be hosted on their first floor in Mitte, in a bright, airy and central space, complete with kitchen, a focussed work space for 40 people and of course, a ping pong table for those much needed breaks!

Space for our community workshops and talks

Even more awesome, with meeting rooms and their auditorium available, we have a large enough space to host our evening community talks and workshops. Last Summer saw around 400 people come to our different events so we are super pumped to be able to host these again!

If you have any topic suggestions of things you would like to attend a talk on, or even better, if you want to give a talk or workshop on something in collaboration with us, then just let us know (team@hackership.org).

Wooga’s positive engineering culture

The Wooga team is one of the most successful in mobile game development, with over 50 million people playing their free games every month across multiple platforms. More than just hosting us in a great space in a central location, we’re really happy to partner with a company that seems to have a very positive engineering culture.

I actually first met Mel, a developer at Wooga for the last two years, at the Womenize conference in Berlin, earlier this year. Some of the Wooga team were speaking about diversity and the gender balance (or lack thereof) in tech. Wooga has a good ratio across the company, and whilst, as is common, there are still many more men in developer roles, they strive to attract more female developers too. This is important to us, as we believe strongly in modelling the change you want to see. (More news about our Mentorship Programme to come soon :) )

And also when talking to Wooga team members in my visits there, I was excited by their efforts to create a positive culture. The strong focus on mentoring within the company, agile development in its true sense, and staying light on unnecessary bureaucracy, so coders can code, are all things that make us very excited about the engineering culture at Wooga. We’re keen to share their approaches and best practices with our learners, where relevant. (The bring-your-pet- to- work policy is also pretty fun too, with about 9 dogs strolling around the staff of 250, across a few floors. )

If this all sounds awesome and you want to be a part of the Berlin batch- you can still apply, but hurry, applications close soon!

pssst… if you want to take a sneak peak at their main work space on the third and fourth floor, take a tour here. All pictures posted here came from that page too.