Iftar at Apetit: The Sarajevo Team Picks a Menu

From time to time, the Sarajevo Clearview team meets in the same room. "Same room" takes work and dedication. Most days, the team is stretched across the globe in apartments in Sarajevo, Malang, and Cape Town, with a laptop on US East Coast time for a client.

The week before Ramadan, as it is the company's custom, Amina booked us a table for iftar at Apetit, the food spot everyone in Sarajevo recommends. It sits on Vilsonovo šetalište, the riverside promenade locals call Vils, five minutes from most of our apartments.

svejedno

whatever, fine with me

može

works for me

ekipa

the crew, our people

fakat

honestly, for real

meni

for me / put me down for

pa kad je iftar

well, whenever iftar is (the punchline)

Here is the thread that got us there, translated and lightly compressed:

A few things in that thread stayed with me.

"Svejedno."

Half the thread is people saying svejedno. In this team, that word means trust. Amina booked the restaurant, picked the menu options, chased the head-count. Nobody in the thread felt the need to second-guess any of it. When one of us takes on the coordination work, the rest of us get out of the way. And we take any excuse to sit at the same table — Clearview picks up the tab, and a distributed team never says no to a paid-for meal.

The same pattern shows up on client work. When someone picks up a task, the rest of the team stays out of the way. We ask when we have something to add, and we say svejedno — or the English equivalent, "sounds good, go for it" — when we don't.

Sometimes the person out front is the senior engineer on a client sprint. This time it was Amina, the one who knows every food spot in Sarajevo.

"Pa kad je iftar."

Amina's reply to my what-time question assumes that everyone at the table already knows when iftar is. A non-Bosnian reader would probably miss it.

Iftar is the meal Muslims eat to break the daily fast during the month of Ramadan. It happens at sunset, which means the exact time slides ten to fifteen minutes later every week as the days get longer. In Sarajevo in mid-March, sunset was somewhere around 6:15 pm. If you knew the calendar, you knew the time. If you did not, you asked, and Amina answered. Because she is the boss.

The cultural detail did not have to be spelled out in the thread. Everyone on the invite already got it.

Time for meza

The corporate menu did land in the end. The five of us who made it — Amina, Aid, Adnan, Ahmed, and me — ate at Apetit as the sun set behind the hills over the Miljacka. Redzy joined for part of it. There were the standard meza, the Bosnian word for the little starter plates other cuisines call mezze or mezes. In Bosnia, meza is the part of the meal where the real talking happens, where a table settles in and stops being in a hurry. Then came the mains, and then someone ordered Bosanska kafa and the conversation wandered, as it always does, into a mix of shop talk and family news.

Nobody talked about "team building."

We had not all sat at the same table since the last one, and we would probably not sit at the same table for another couple of months. That is the rhythm of a distributed team — long stretches of async work broken by a shared meal every few months.

Why the dinner is worth it

For a distributed team, in-person meals matter more than they look. The grand summit in Bali counts — Clearview gathered in Ubud in January — but the small local dinner counts too, and it happens more often. The one where Amina's message goes out, five people RSVP within the day, and the reservation goes under her name because she is the one who called the restaurant. Typical Amina. She knows the best places to eat in Sarajevo, and the rest of us are smart enough to show up where she tells us to.

Every time we do one of these, the async work that follows for the next few weeks is smoother. Threaded replies come with more benefit of the doubt, less second-guessing, nobody a stranger. If you have never worked distributed, that is the reason to spend real money on getting people in a room. It makes the rest of the year work better.

We are lucky, in Sarajevo, that most of the Clearviewers here can be in the same city inside of an hour. Having enough of us in one city to fill a table on short notice is a real gift. When Ahmed messages that he doesn't like dolma and sarma, or Amina jokes that we should all know when iftar is, that only feels normal because we have eaten together before.

Nedim  ·  Sarajevo  ·  March 2026