January is the month of last year’s summary. It’s a great opportunity to take a look at our achievements and plan new actions. What happened at fireup.pro in 2020? So here we are – wrapping up this unique year in this article. Enjoy!

Sales

The most important events in the business aspect of our company were:

  • to learn and understand the new circumstances on the global market and adapt our sales strategy to it, 
  • due to fewer inbound leads, we took a different outbound approach including exceptional online events & conferences. 

Some industries were heavily impacted leading to less interest in software services, while others, on the contrary, have experienced huge growth.
The rules of the game were changing all the time during the pandemic, so was our sales approach.

Additionally, in July, Clutch published an annual report on Poland’s top B2B service providers and developers, and our company was included among Top Software Developers for 2020!

We became an AWS Partner! We were recognized as an experienced Amazon Cloud Services provider. This latest recognition from AWS reflects our ability to follow best practices for AWS cloud services and proves our success in delivering these services to our customers. We are now listed in the APN Partner Finder (read more about how we became the AWS partner).

Superheldin and Inoqo companies have joined the group of our clients.

We are strengthening ties with our current customers by expanding the scope of joint projects. The best example is the cooperation of fireup.pro with mySugr or Trans.eu.

Every project, even the coolest one, comes to an end. It was also the case with our cooperation with MyBenefit. We completed the joint project with great success, as proof of which the Black team received an award. The trophy takes a place of honor in our office, and we remember the time of working together with great joy.

Technology

Tools and technologies that we used and developed in 2020:

  • Quarkus: an application framework designed with containerization in mind – helps create lightweight and fast services. With the help of Quarkus, we have created a service that provides statistical data about companies and their employees.
  • Node.js + TypeScript.
  • Camunda – a business process modeling tool (the visual design of the process, time trigger processing).
  • Kafka, Kafka Connect, KSQL, Debezium – allow us to collect data from different locations (databases, queuing systems, services) in one place for analysis, archiving, or further processing.
  • D3.js – it’s a library for data visualization written in JavaScript. All popular libraries of graphs and visualizations use D3 to a greater or lesser extent [used in METRIX].
  • PWA – Progressive Web Application. The main advantages are the speed of such applications, „like an application” feeling, automatic updates [used in Superheldin project].
  • Express & routing-controllers, Typeform, AWS Cognito, Docker, and deploy on AWS Cypress [all used in optifire project].
  • GraphQL + Sequelize + Relay – GraphQL is an alternative to the traditional REST API. Its main advantage is only one endpoint, and a properly constructed query, which provides only the necessary data for which we are asking. Sequelize served us as an ORM for the database, while Relay (a tool created by Facebook and actively used in Facebook) allows us to query GraphQL endpoints from the front and cache the data [used in METRIX].
  • Firebase – a Google product. Firebase can be responsible for backend architecture, marketing, performance monitoring, management of uploaded files, testing, modifying applications, and safe storage. Thanks to Firebase we can create any application without using the backend. We can connect any framework such as Angular or React and work with Firebase.
  • WebSockets – refreshing live applications
  • Allure – generation of regression test reports
  • Spock / Groovy – a lighter way to write unit and integration tests
  • GitLab CI

And many others. The life of a developer is very rich in tools of any kind.

HR / Recruitment

We started 2020 with 66 employees and closed with 82 employees! The yearly staff turnover remains at the level of about 17% (13 of 74 on average).

In 2021 we will continue to increase employment. You absolutely need to take a look at our Career page to see if we’re waiting exactly for you!

EB

It was a very intensive year for employer branding! In January we started with a keynote, where every team had the opportunity to summarize the previous year’s achievements and to set goals for the year 2020. After the official part of the event, we had time for a little fun:

In February, we hosted special guests. Students of Technical Secondary School visited our office, so we could teach them something new about:

And, of course, we explained our recruitment process and discussed the organization culture at fireup.pro. We lit a spark of interest in IT and advised the students on how to look for their first job.

And then there came the pandemic. We had to postpone many of our plans. However, as a company working remotely for our partners, we quickly adapted to the new reality and its requirements. In June, we shared our observations with Gazeta Wyborcza in the article about The tools of the pandemic.

TalkIT

The new conditions did not stop us from launching the much planned TalkIT webinar cycle, during which our experts shared their knowledge with some practical examples! We conducted 4 webinars, that gathered about 200 participants. We talked about the most interesting topics from the world of broadly understood development:

  1. How to build a real-time data streaming platform in Apache Kafka using free tools only.
  2. Making Custom Home Automation Using Raspberry Pi and JavaScript.
  3. Appium and AWS Device Farm is not only about test automation.
  4. How to become a programmer.

More webinars are on the way!

Talk2Duck

To develop a community connected with TalkIT webinars, we launched the Talk2Duck group on FB in September. The name was taken from the inseparable partner of every developer – the yellow duck, which helps to solve even the most difficult technical problems in an original way! The group was created for all programming enthusiasts who are looking for valuable discussions and want to share their opinion and knowledge. If you aren’t already a Talk2Duck member, join today!

Blog

2020 is the time when our blog flourished. We published 23 new articles! Additionally, our publications can be found on medium.com

Sports

Apart from coding and testing, we also do sports. We can play table soccer on a daily basis, and our sports activities are not only e-sport. They are also football matches on the pitch, playing volleyball, skating and even sailing together!

We took part in #GaszynChallenge, because we love to help! Watch the video!

Check our social profiles to see what places our employees have managed to visit as part of active recreation: FB.

Conferences, meetups

In 2020, we didn’t have too many opportunities to attend conferences in stationary, because after the first quarter the world moved to virtual reality. Nevertheless, we managed to take part in Boiling Frogs:

The most popular among our employees were webinars and meetups dealing with the development of cloud services, which is why we were very happy to take part in the virtual edition of the largest annual event organized by AWS: re:invent 2020 at the end of the year.

Training, development

This year we focused on expanding our skills in the field of cloud solutions, mainly AWS. As an AWS partner, we can boast the following certifications:

  • AWS Cloud Practitioner 4 people,
  • AWS Solutions Architect Associate 3 people,
  • AWS SysOps Administrator Associate 1 person.
Moreover, as an AWS Partner, we have access to accredited training courses in two paths: Business Professional and Technical Professional. We currently have 8 employees who can boast of having accreditation for these courses.
We also did not skip Java training via Oracle. This year, our developers have obtained 4 OCA certificates and 3 OCP certificates. In total, there are already 15x OCA and 10x OCP.

This is a good place to mention our unique testers! Without them, our applications and solutions would not be so reliable. Due to the cancellation of most of the events, the attention of this group shifted to training. The choice fell on Java + Selenium and training in obtaining ISTQB certificates.

Internally we conducted only 1 Tech Talk in our office in March. Igor, our backend developer, shared his experience on how to deliver an app backend with Node.js.


Since March, our office looks mostly like this:

However, this does not mean that we have stopped sharing our knowledge! We regularly meet at the backend, frontend, and test guilds. This year, we learned from each other about:

  • Docker’s multistage,
  • automated tests in CD pipeline with AWS Code Build;
  • how to use ArchUnit in creating rules,
  • the advantages and disadvantages of building an application in node.js and Java.

As you can see, last year was exceptionally intensive. 2021 – here we come!