2018 Rewind by Visuality
Check out what happened at Visuality in 2018. Happy New Year everybody!
Poznań office
No, we didn’t move to the beautiful city of Poznań. But we have a new office! Visuality opened a branch in the capital of the Wielkopolska Voivodship in the former chocolate factory. Thanks to Makerspace we are able to use convenient co-work office and use interesting facilities and machines. 3D printing? Welding? No problem, we can do it all. Well, we can program too.
Read more here: http://www.visuality.pl/posts/visuality-poznan-is-here
OKRs
Visuality by no means tries to be a corporation, but rules and plans are important for every company. We introduced quarterly goals to improve ourselves even more. We have global OKRs as a company and individual ones. They helped us learn new things, improve processes and be persistent. We are using Weekdone and highly recommend it.
Visuality on tour
Thanks to the cooperation with PARP, next year we will participate in several conferences. It will certainly help us promote Visuality and acquire new interesting projects. See you on SXSW, TechCrunch and Gitex soon!
Read more here: http://www.visuality.pl/posts/tech-conferences-2018-2019-you-definitely-should-attend
Being together
Visuality is not only a place where we work. There is always time for little leisure and parties. This year it could be different and we had couple of barbecues, among many we organized an after party for WRUG, had a few board games sessions and of course celebrated Christmas eve. It was as always a wonderful time for Visuality family.
Read more about why we like to be together here: http://www.visuality.pl/posts/why-do-we-like-to-be-together
More content
You may have heard that we every 1–2 weeks we organize lightning talks about tech, project management, our passions etc. Such lightning talk takes up to 15 minutes and its objective is to pass on as much knowledge as possible. We started to record them and if you’re interested you can check them out here: http://bit.ly/lightning_talks_visuality
We also increased the frequency of adding new blog posts. We hope you noticed! In 2018 we posted 22 articles
One of the best out there
Speaking about quality and development, we managed to climb up the Clutch ranking ladder and currently we are rated 9th best Ruby on Rails software house in the world according to the main Clutch rating. We are the bearers of the 1st place in the Review rating which means that we have the best review scores of all 186 RoR companies listed. We were also featured in the list of top 200 global leaders among software houses. Thank you Clutch!
Check out our Clutch profile https://clutch.co/profile/visuality
Design award
We are proud of our UX/UI designer. Kudos to Lukasz Jackiewicz and Bartek Bednarski. Guys are often praised by the clients and our teams, but it means something when you are featured by Behance.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/65442715/Banking-App-Free-UI
Staff and processes
We improved and mapped our recruitment process according to best market practices. We hired great engineers that quickly felt here like at home. We maintained a very low turnover ratio (on average more than 2 years per developer). We also celebrated 4 years at Visuality of 4 employees and 3 years of 3 of them. Our developers participated in multiple conferences and WRUG meetings.
Speaking about events, take a look at our superstar frontend developer’s lecture on Web Push!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XdwYWqyfOE
We introduced team leaders to the company structure. Each team has a senior colleague they can always ask for help and guidance. Team leaders perform cyclic 1 on 1 meetings with team members that help to improve the skills and working harmony. Thanks to team leaders, the development runs smoother and it’s easier to predict and solve the issues.
Business developers always talk a lot about SCRUM, don’t we? Agile this and agile that. But salespeople usually don’t work in SCRUM, right? Not in our case. We adopted SCRUM, and sales team works exactly the same way as development teams do. The only difference is that we use Trello instead of Jira and run shorter sprints.
Read our CEO’s article about Visuality’s people here: http://www.visuality.pl/posts/all-the-pieces-matter-visuality-dna
New tech
This year we were able to enrich our offer in proven PWA solutions. Progressive web apps are a great substitute for the native mobile apps, especially in professional use. This cost-effective solution requires only one application that adjusts to both Android and iOS devices.
Read our article about PWA’s here: [http://www.visuality.pl/posts/hot-topic-progressive-web-apps-instead-of-native-mobile-apps]
We gained new experience in hosting and mastered Amazon’s AWS and its production software like Fargate. Before that, we used mainly Heroku, but currently, we are able to use both. Choose wisely :)
We introduced wallboards with essential information about the projects. Each team can see real-time data about their project. We use Raspberry PI to which we connect monitors, we connect them to the internet and display the interface created by our developers. Wallboard connects to certain systems like our Jira, rollbar or airbrake errors, has scripts that perform cyclic checks of the code. All is displayed with tiles and graphs that change colors depending on the status. This traffic lights system is helpful as when something goes wrong all is lit up in red, but when everything is fine it’s green as a meadow.
Read more here: [http://www.visuality.pl/posts/wallboards-a-great-value-for-our-teams-and-clients]
Projects
2018 was certainly fruitful in interesting projects. Visuality throughout this year was engaged in large four ongoing projects mainly located in the United States (3) and UK (1).
We are really satisfied with last year’s achievements and hope that we will make 2019 even better!
And how was 2018 for you?
If you’re interested in more blog posts like this please visit our Visuality Blogor our Medium Page
Originally published at www.visuality.pl.
