Year in review
Deemaze turns 3 years old today after a challenging and very rewarding year! 🎊🎂
We’re pleased to say 2017 was quite busy for Deemaze. With the end of the year and our anniversary, there’s no better timing for a yearly reflection and to prepare for the one ahead. In short, this is what our 2017 looked like:
🚀 Worked on 4 projects
🎤 Attended 3 conferences
💻 Participated in 4 hackathons
🌍 Went on 3 recreative trips
If you’re curious to know more specifics, it’s your lucky day. We summed it up for you.
Projects
This year we worked on 4 projects with teams from 4 different countries: Portugal 🇵🇹 of course, United States 🇺🇸, United Kingdom 🇬🇧 and the Netherlands 🇳🇱.
Storytrail
Storytrail helps you explore cities, unveil curious stories and discover unexpected paths. Each city includes a set of walking routes for the user to follow while watching short videos about each point of interest. ✈️ ⛺️
This product was developed with Bürocratik and redlight. They designed and developed the web app, and we joined the project afterwards to develop the native app for iOS.
Brythm
A rhythmic breathing app, developed with Bournemouth University and Nourish, for a research with expectant mothers on how daily breathing exercises influence their blood pressure.
Deemaze developed the native apps for Android and iOS — and we wrote about it in our last blog post, so go ahead and dig in!
POP
POP is a Messenger bot platform for artists to reach fans directly. With POP, artists and labels can skip the congested social feeds and push updates and content directly to their fans. 📲 Why don’t you explore the free trial mode to see for yourself?
Furthermore, you can already follow and receive exclusive content from several artists such as Armin van Buuren, Run the Jewels, Noah Cyrus, Noel Gallagher, Enter Shikari, and more! 😎
We’ve been working on this project with the POP team from the Netherlands.
Binder
Binder Studio is a tool for remote music production, allowing musicians to connect from all around the world. Binder was our internal project this year and we developed the platform for both web and Android.
We’re gathering musicians for its beta release, give it a try. 🎸
An eventful year
This year we were lucky enough to attend several cool conferences and even cooler hackathons.
We kicked off the year with Shift Appens, a 48h hackathon organized by JeKnowledge and NEIAAC. ⚡️ And because we love the hackathons’ thrill, we didn’t miss What the hack, on Landing Festival; Nest-à-tona, Nest Collective’s own hackathon; and our first internal hackathon (which we used to put some work into Binder and improve our Puzzle Bobble skills on the arcade machine 🕹).
As for conferences, we attended Lisbon.ai, Mirror Conf, Google DevFest Coimbra; plus a couple of meetups like The Zain Talks (a design meetup organized by the Nest Collective companies).
All work and no play?
It’s not all just business. We spend all our work time together. As a result, we sort of grew fond of each other, and also enjoy spending time together outside the office. And this year we had some awesome opportunities to do so!
We started with a trip to Amsterdam 🌷 — where we finally got to meet our friends from POP in person. Then, a surf weekend with the gang from the Nest Collective (above you can see António Lima rocking those waves 🏄). And last, but not least, we traveled to Gaia for some tasty Porto wine and a massive paintball war. 🎯
Everyone needs a little fun every once in a while! Let’s see what we come up with this year. Suggestions?
Be a Deemazer
We’ve just started looking for a shiny new web developer. If you’re a web ninja, JS sorcerer, CSS rockstar, RoR lord, React jedi, … — it really doesn’t matter what you call yourself!
Check all specifications and don’t be shy. We’re waiting for you!
It’s a wrap… for now.
We did a great deal of learning this past year. After our interns joined the team full time, we had to adapt to having a bigger team than we were used to — as well as managing more projects simultaneously. We invested more time and work on an internal product than in the previous years. And still had room to help out the more vulnerable people in our community (victims of the wildfires and the children of Ninho dos Pequenitos), which was a truly important goal for us.
But it’s far from over. We’re still exploring ways to increase our productivity. We want to be more effective on learning new tools and languages for the upcoming projects and improving the current ones. And surely we’re going to find many more questions and entirely new challenges throughout the next year.
We can’t predict all of them, but we’re definitely excited for the journey! 😃
