The Importance of Coffee Times and Jam Sessions

Well, today’s the day. PostLab 2.0 is now available in Early Access Release.

One massive innovation in PostLab 2.0 is Event Locking for Final Cut Pro. As a diehard fan of FCP (née FCP X) and PostLab Classic, I’m proud to share Co-Inventor honors for this feature alongside Jasper Siegers, PostLab’s creator.

But what sparked all of this?

Since Hedge is spread across multiple time zones, the leadership scheduled regular time slots so teammates could come in and hang out with each other. These occasions were simply known as Coffee.

The time slots shifted based on the team’s needs and daylight savings time, but Coffee typically happened over Zoom or Around at 10:00 and 3:00 (15:00) in your time zone.

Of course, I’m in the US (ET). But the rest of the team is six hours ahead of me in Europe (mostly The Netherlands) on Central European Time (CET).

A couple of years ago, I was in a 3:00P ET Coffee when –???????? –?Jasper stopped by!

When it became clear we would be the only ones in that Coffee, he started telling me about some of the foundational work he was doing on PostLab 2.0.

I asked, “Since it’s so early, can we dream the impossible dream for a sec? I know we can do locking on a Library level, but what if we could do locking on Events in a Library?”

Based on Jasper’s vantage point, he didn’t think that was possible.

Then I threw out to him, “Well… what if we did this…?”

Jasper thought about it, tried it, and that seemed to work!

Then I said, “OK... if that’s true, what if we tried…?”

Jasper tried that, and that seemed to work too!

For Reasons, I cannot disclose the actual contents of that conversation.

But in my mind? It felt a lot like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2S_dnieU

Conventional Wisdom says, “Remote teams don’t work. You just can’t get those organic hallway/watercooler/coffee moments like you can in a real office.”

What do you think?

Jasper was up at 9:00P his time. That wasn’t typical.

I was the only person at 3:00P Coffee that day in the US. Also not typical.

What started as a typical Coffee slot morphed into a jam session (maybe one hour or so because we got carried away ??), which led to an industry-first –?true collaboration for Final Cut Pro with Event Locking.

I celebrate this phase of PostLab 2.0’s release with Jasper, Simon, Tim, Taco, Freek, Paul, and the rest of the Hedge team. It's a monumental achievement.

Learn more about PostLab 2.0 on Hedge’s blog: https://blog.hedge.video/postlab-faqs/