The Zalando Web Guild is a group of like-minded frontend engineers who meet bi-weekly to discuss new technologies, share knowledge, and collaborate on diverse projects. With so many independent teams and engineers from different backgrounds, we felt that there was too little communication between them, so that teams often solved similar problems instead of sharing code and knowledge.

This is especially important in the area of frontend development, where new technologies seem to spring up weekly. Sadly, not all of these technologies will be relevant, which is why we discuss and evaluate new technologies within the Guild.

We first launched the Web Guild in late January 2016 with two presentations on Promises in Node.js and the new Frontend Architecture in our Fashion Store. Ever since, we’ve kept these presentations up every other week on topics such as Elm, Redux, Linting, and Unicode.

We currently have 35 active members who attend meetings, communicate daily, and contribute to open source projects. While we’re mostly focused on frontend, we’ve also touched on JavaScript in the backend when it's relevant to group members, like the talk about Promises in Node.js shows.

You don’t necessarily need to present a topic to propose it. We try to collect topics that the group is interested in, and then people can jump in if they feel they have something to contribute. We feel that this process fosters discussion about relevant topics; we’re currently looking into Service Workers, Functional Programming, Angular 2.0, Testing and Tooling, and a lot more.

In our opinion, the Web Guild has been incredibly successful at fulfilling its aim in fostering collaboration and sharing knowledge between teams. Following this success, we’re planning our first ever external meetup of the Guild in May. What we hope to get out of an external meetup is the opportunity to hear from speakers outside of Zalando who can meaningfully contribute to what we do as front-end engineers. It’s also a way to communicate with others outside of the organisation who might benefit from our knowledge.

We’ll be featuring presentations by Princiya Marina Sequeira, who’ll be speaking about JavaScript’s misunderstood status and how developers can have fun with it, and Dmitriy Kubyshkin, who will focus on frontend in a microservice world, paying particular attention to possible strategies of a distributed frontend and the pros and cons of these strategies.

Join us on 3rd May, 2016 at Zalando Tech HQ in Berlin. You can find all the information you need about the event here.