Full House
June 30, 2026
3 min read
Lunch & Learn
The best habit we built this year kept going with every week one of us gets up at lunch and teaches the rest of the team the thing they know better than most and June was stacked. Eoin and Xavier kicked it off with a session so good people were still talking about it days later, Hindie went next and got deep into his corner of the stack then Jared closed the month out. Whole team in the room, seasoned engineers and month one hires learning the same thing at the same time not to mention we record them too so nobody who was heads down on a client build has to miss out.
The Office Became a Stadium
For a few weeks in June the office doubled as a viewing party. World Cup games went up on the big screen at genuinely cursed hours, 5am, 6am, whenever the Socceroos were on, and people still showed up. Australia beating Turkey 2 nil was peak. Australia going down to the USA on an own goal was less peak, but we suffered through it together, which is the whole point. Nobody scheduled any of it. It just became the thing, the way the good ones always do.
Never ending LyraClubs
The clubs did not slow down for winter with Cafe Club claimed a permanent table at Toby's Estate and turned the morning coffee run into a proper institution. Somehow, the Melbourne team always manages to get to the café before Sydney, despite starting from another state.The running theory holds: join something new on a Tuesday and by Thursday half the office is in it too. We have stopped trying to explain it, this is just how people here actually get to know each other outside of the work.
Welcome!!
The room got bigger 3 times over this month.Christian Lam came in at the start of June and slotted straight in. His CV does the talking: engineered embedded systems in the medical space at ResMed, built frontend at Optus, and came to us from swipejobs. On top of that he tutored software engineering at university, so half the office already knew him as the marker who did not hand out easy grades (glad he is on our side of the whiteboard now).Emma Nguyen joined as our very first Events hire, which is a big deal for where we are heading. She is based at the Sydney office part time and heads to Melbourne whenever something big is on. She comes in off the back of running events for the UNSW societies, so if you have been to a CSESoc or EngSoc night you have probably already met her. Having someone whose whole job is bringing people together is going to reshape what we do for the rest of the year.Nicholas William Hadiwijaya rounded out the month as our newest engineer. He studied computer science at UC Irvine in the States, then finished a Masters in computer science, data science and machine learning here in Sydney, and brings a stack of backend experience from his time building in Indonesia. The team gave him the standard Lyra welcome, which is to say loud and immediate.
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