Humanity vs. technology? Koding believes in humanity and technology

If you're around the right people, IT can be friendly. :-)"”
This is what Dana Ivanov told us, after the unexpected visit she made to us together with Alina and Măriuca, two high school students in search of vocational inspiration. We say unexpected because, through a combination of circumstances, we didn't know they were coming, but also because, despite this fact, the meeting was unexpectedly inspiring not only for them, but also for us.
They knocked on our attic door, on Tuesday a few minutes before 4:00 PM, just as we were waiting for a business partner for a long-planned meeting. It took us a few minutes to understand the reason for their presence at our place, and soon we were around the table where we usually meet with the extended team, not knowing how we were going to divide ourselves between the guests and the scheduled meeting. But as sometimes happens in Oscar movies, the circumstances suited us perfectly: our partner, who is not used to such behavior, forgot about the meeting, so we let ourselves be led by our passion for technology, by questions and answers that generated other questions, for a few hours. Without being very clear why, at the end we were all with smiles on our faces and didn't feel like leaving.
Because we promised ourselves that we would have more such meetings with high school students, we retrospectively extract from the whole incident a few principles and lessons to keep in mind:

• When there's a will, there's a way. I was happy to see my colleagues finding ingenious solutions to their (very technical) tasks while participating in the discussion, because they wanted to be there too.
• In unforeseen situations, start from the actual state of affairs. Not having prepared a speech or presentation for this purpose, we started talking about the Calendar in the suite. Office 365, as the tool that could have avoided the misunderstanding related to the planning of this meeting. In the end, we launched the challenge that the next visit can be scheduled with a single click on the link that gives access to one of our calendars. It's a functionality integrated by Hubspot, a company whose organizational culture inspired us at Koding.
• The principle according to which we learn best through play or play also applies to technology. To get an objective look at how the two students felt when they met us, we played around with Microsoft Cognitive Services, an app that reveals a person's emotions based on facial analysis. This seems to have been the most successful in our attempt to make the two girls friends with technology. If you're curious to try it out yourself, you have access to it here.

And beyond the discussion about IT and career guidance, the leitmotif of the meeting was that people are good. I'm not just talking about Dana (who, in addition to her job, volunteers for the project). We are getting bigger to give wings to as many institutionalized children as possible), or about my colleagues (who are hard to catch free normally, but who mobilized themselves exemplary in such a situation), but about the goodness that lies within each of us, active or latent, but which is there and waiting to be found and cultivated.
What good deed did you do today?