Back in September, team 10up gathered in Atlanta from around the globe for four days of knowledge sharing, team building, and face-to-face time. Our days were filled with inspiring, educational presentations from our peers, while the evenings let us kick back and relax with teammates whom we normally only see on our computer screen.

The event began with an in-depth keynote presented by company leadership: our own 10up State of the Union. The keynote was followed by more than a dozen sessions presented by 10uppers who contributed their time and effort to share their knowledge, lessons learned, and perspective. Topics—to name a few—explored:

• new tools, best practices, and important concepts for engineering, user experience, and design;
• techniques we can use to delight our clients;
• lessons learned from projects;
• the current and future state of content platforms and distribution;
• ways to support more performant, effective web ads that are more profitable for publishers without sacrificing visitor engagement, and;
• how to identify and manage impostor syndrome.

We also found some time to challenge our pods (10up lingo for our teams) to a scavenger hunt. Each pod was given identical goals and instructed to provide photographic evidence of completion. Two missions generated the most gallery-worthy results.

Take a picture of 10uppers mimicking a statue’s pose. An inordinate number of us chose to mirror the statue of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympics Committee, located in Centennial Olympic Park.

Re-enact an Olympic moment in Centennial Olympic Park. Speaking of Centennial Park, this challenge inspired 10uppers to pantomime sprinting, swimming, and podium-posing with gold medals under a bright, blue Atlanta sky.

To cap off the event, we held our second annual Uppies Awards ceremony, an internal recognition of jobs well done (hosted by yours truly and our president, Jake Goldman). The ceremony culminates with the honoring of three Uplifters: 10uppers who spur on their colleagues with positivity and a can-do spirit.

It’s a rare treat for a distributed company to share a physical space. Each year, the Summit aims to provide #team10up the opportunity to learn, teach, inspire, and build stronger personal bonds. I’m already looking forward to next year.