Softonic

I have confess that this was shorter than I would have thought or wished for, but Thursday is my last day at Splendia. Splendia is a very different company from my previous employer Softonic. While Softonic has all the perks and advantages of a big successful company with a large development team. Splendia is much smaller and when I arrived the whole team had just arrived too and was confronted with a "legacy" code base. The amount we managed to do in this year is just amazing and this wouldn't have been possible without the brilliant team. Fernando (the CTO when I started), recruited very well and made everyone fit in right away. We changed everything, from introducing scrum sprints, going from zero to 3000 unit tests, re-factoring big parts of the system, continuous integration, functional testing and everything else you expect from a modern Internet company. I gave a talk at WeLovePHP last weekend, which talked about all of this. I leave because of changes in the structure of the company and because I have the opportunity to join an exciting new project. More about this when I have started...

I must admit that this post comes a bit late. As I have mentioned before, I have left Softonic last year. The main reason was that it was too difficult to change anything there and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. This might have changed by know. After Softonic I started at Splendia, where I am still at. Splendia is a hotel booking website focusing on luxury hotels. The company is much smaller than Softonic in every respect. What drew me in was that they replaced nearly the whole IT team and replaced it with a much more agile team using technologies and methodologies that are industry standards in most PHP companies. The team is also always open for changes to improve the speed of development. When we arrived the state of the code was pretty bad. How bad? Well, there were zero unit tests at the beginning of 2012 for example. By now we have a growing test suite, continuously run through Jenkins. We use github for code reviews, vagrant for workspace virtual machines, cucumber for functional tests, puppet for configuration management and composer to pull in various dependencies including symfony components, doctrine and pear libraries. I will post some more about how we use these in the future. Other nice perks: the computers are nice with two big screens, you get to install your choice OS as long as it runs vagrant. The office is located in the centre of Barcelona, which gives a better choice of restaurants and shops. I can also park my bike in the office, which allows me to commute every day now (more about this later too). There are some things I miss about Softonic though (besides the people there): the pretty office, Spanish classes, free coffee, snacks and the cafeteria for my tea time. Compared to Softonic the office hours at Splendia are also very rigid, which is annoying. Well, hopefully more soon…

moving on Pretty much exactly two years ago I started working for Softonic. I changed from the rather small opus5 to what has been the largest company I have worked for so far. Working in a company of about 250 people with a development team of around 80 people is certainly a different beast. I learned a lot of things especially regarding scrum management and web technologies. I also learned that it is very difficult to change things once something big like this is in motion. Size also brings nice things, Softonic offers a lot of "google-style" perks, like massages, conference trips, insurance, free fruits, sweets and soft drinks, a very nice office with chill-out room and great views. If you are interested have a look at: careers.softonic.com. It also means that you will always find someone interesting to talk to. But now it is time to move on. I am joining a smaller company with a new team, that I will write about in another post. I will stay in Barcelona though. I want to thank everyone I worked with at Softonic, especially the brilliant SD team, SEO, the leads, the UK content team (for tea time entertainment) and everyone I chatted to in these years.

This year I am doing the updates every four months and April is nearly over, so here it goes. 1. Loose weight: going very well. I dropped from an average weight of 79 to 74.7kg and moved from “overweight” to “normal weight” BMI category. I didn’t my lifestyle too much, I just eat and snack a bit less. One big helper has been the physics diet website, which keeps a nice average graph and helps me to stay motivated. I just have to go another 1.7kg to reach my goal for the year. 2. Reduce time spend watching TV, reading e-mails, blogs, facebook and twitter. I reduced the number of RSS feeds from 600 to 479 and the posts I read per day from 365 to 240 (including tweets). And I spend less time on each post, as I use readitlater to mark interesting posts and read them when I have time for it. I also stopped watching a few TV shows and stopped using facebook. Overall I notice that I have more time and I am sure I can do a bit more in the next eight months. Using GTD more also helped with my time management. 3. Do something about my so called “career”. This could mean doing something more fun, working less and/or earning more money. As mentioned in the previous post, I have decided to go for something more fun with a job at softonic. I will judge how it turned out in the coming months. For some reason I seem to have too many choices at the moment. Maybe I should have chosen more goals, but the success so far seems to be an indicator that it is good to concentrate on a few. Next update will be at the end of August. Some left overs from last year, which I worked on this year too: ...

This week I started my new job at Softonic. After three years at opus5 I decided that it was time to move on. I learned a lot in this time and as I like to say, a lot of things I really never wanted to learn. I worked in a great team and wish them all the luck for the future (And in case you are looking for a PHP job, I am sure they are looking for more people). While writing my 2010 New Year’s Resolutions, I came to the conclusion that it is finally time to make a move. I was looking for a company, which is more focused on development and the possibility to learn new stuff. ...