Boozt Technology Baltics

How can one understand what it’s like to be working for a specific company?

A question with no quick answer. There are several angles to look at, and each speaks something a bit different.

We’re ending this year with 53 colleagues:

🔎 4 Managers
🔎 9 Team Leads
🔎 16 Senior Developers
🔎 27 people working longer than two years
🔎 13 who joined us this year

Behind these stats, there are 53 amazing people - people who (echoing their voice):

💡 cherish good relationships in team and cross-team
💡 can count on co-workers
💡 enjoy having a work-life balance
💡 feel they can be themselves at work
💡 define their colleagues as professional, interesting, respectful, friendly, fun and… human!

So this is us - people with different responsibilities, positions and working experiences, yet still - equal people. We’re happy to be a place with not only a professional but also a people-focused approach alive.

Therefore we ended this year with a little bit of both during our Christmas party. The “BooztStar” awards, spotlighting some epic moments from our daily life, was the most fun and unexpected. An interesting “Protų kovos” game followed where the mastery of some was unbelievable, but the road to it was even more enjoyable. And for later - well, you know what happens later with good company of people.

📸 Vytenis Budrys

* 1.000.000.000 views across all the different marketing channels. Yes, it's one billion.
* We started with a cloud configuration of 20 preheated virtual machines on Boozt and 6 VMs on Booztlet. This was scaled up to a maximum of 48 VMs for Boozt and an average of 25 VMs throughout the days around Black Friday.
* In total during the 5 days around Black Friday, the robots moved a total distance of 143.000 km — representing the same distance as 3.5 times around the world.

These are stats from our recent Black Friday.

"Ex*****on of the Black Friday season has been a cultural success. Tremendous collaboration across all teams whether you work with products, customers, campaigns or technology, this is the peak of the year. The cliche that no chain is stronger than the weakest link comes to show these days." Jesper Brodnum, Co-founder & CTO Boozt.

To understand better the complexity of our business, try to feel what it's like for Platform teams to prepare for Black Friday and to take a glance at more Infrastructure, Warehouse, Web Shop Performance stats - jump into this thorough article on medium:

Black Friday in an Online Department Store It’s that time of the year. You know it. You love it and you hate it. It’s the Black Friday season — an activity that used to be one day…

Today marks ten years anniversary of the VilniusPHP community - monthly developers meetups to share knowledge, get to know each other and grow together despite the company one works for.

We were with VilniusPHP from the very beginning, as the idea of this community was born to our then-colleagues back in the days when we were called Estina. Although they grew (to) other companies over time, we remained friends with organizers and supported the VilniusPHP community all these years.

Let’s take a moment to thank our colleagues who shared their know-how with community members:
🤝 Vytautas Verseckas (2 presentations)
🤝 Andrej Muzikovs
🤝 Marco Rosello (8 presentations)
🤝 Jose Lozenzo Rodriguez
🤝 Edvardas Kazlauskas (2 presentations)
🤝 Mattia Ziulu
🤝 Nerijus Bistrickis
🤝 Rimantas Liubertas (2 presentations)

At the same time, today’s festive meetup is the last of this long-lasting community. We thank the organizers of the VilniusPHP - Povilas, Paulius and Žilvinas - for building this Vilnius developers community for many years. We learned and gained a lot thanks to this community and the job you did behind the scenes!

Do you remember how you felt when you joined a new company? How was your first day or first month? Excitement was probably there and, of course, more than that. We asked Tomas Michalkevic, who joined Boozt 7 months ago having 9 years of software development experience, to share more about the topic.

"When joining a new company, you always wonder about the dynamic or vibe of the place you are going to. Will you be accepted the way you are with your current skill set and will they accept that some things you will have to learn anew to keep up with everyone else already there. In some companies it is encouraged to show initiative, but in others it can be looked down upon by your coworkers.I love showing initiative and walking that extra mile, so I wondered if my wish to keep improving would be met positively. I'm happy this approach was welcomed by my Team Lead and the Android Chapter Lead as well.

If I need more time to do something well - it's ok. I can work on it longer without any approvals even if there was a deadline as the quality of the product is of utmost importance. I know this is not true at every company as some prefer fast delivery and fixing bugs later. Without a doubt, sometimes speed is of a higher priority, but most of the time here, it's better to take time but make it right.

It was my dream to attend a DroidCon conference in one of the cities it is hosted in. So when the opportunity appeared to go to DroidCon Italy, I was ready to take it. It was a pleasant surprise for me that I was encouraged, not just allowed, to do this - I felt that the Chapter Lead was excited to see me go there. I didn't feel like it was taking money from the company or something - my company invested in my knowledge and we both benefited from that. I enjoyed every moment of my time there - listening to speakers, making connections, getting to know how others apply technologies and participating in various challenges. I even won one - check the picture. I came back inspired by my experience in Turin and was happy to share my experiences with Android chapter colleagues. I hope I encouraged them to go to conferences and keep improving as well."

You know that feeling when you take your time to zoom out from daily tasks and have a look at what you’re doing from a broader perspective? When you talk to someone working on the same project but on a bit different side, you can share your way of seeing things and hear how colleagues see it. Sometimes those views complement each other, and other times it leads to some friendly battle to decide which way to go further.

This is what we had during our WebApp Squads Meetup in Malmo, Boozt HQ. All the teams working in our product, account, checkout, listing, navigation, search, price, and landing squads gathered together. 68 colleagues from three different offices met and we had nearly ⅓ of our Vilnius office out there - full Goblins, Podify, Banksters and Switch teams.

During this three-day hackathon, we focused on performance and optimization on both a technical and organizational level. In squads, we discussed our bottlenecks and what we could do to improve, then hacked our ideas out and later showed them off during the WebApp Meet-up presentations. We were happy to find many areas we could optimize and fix them during the hackathon and the days following. We are business driven and this is where we focus first of all. Therefore it was nice to get the brain thinking about things we wanted to do but maybe lowered the priority earlier.

The other goal, maybe even more important, of this gathering was to bond with each other: to foster cross-team relationships, get more interpersonal communication, and get to know each other not only as professionals but as people as well. Afterwork in Malmo and Copenhagen was, as always, a good idea for that.

Vytautas Verseckas, Team Lead/ Senior Software Engineer, joined our company four years ago and eventually found a passion for on-site search. What caught his attention was that this area seemed to be something others were not so willing to take responsibility for. Therefore he wanted to know why and took this as a challenge to see if he could make it.

What he found was that this area seems to be quite complex and having only coding skills is not enough. One needs to consider many various aspects and how they correlate one to another. Even more - it's important to have love for languages as you need to understand people's daily terminology and nuance. Add the scope of 13 different languages and their specifics on top of it, and you'll see it's a challenge not for everyone to thrive.

Vytautas has been using Manticore search for three years and this became his field of expertise. We use this search engine on both our website and internal systems and we have our reasons for that. This is your chance to learn about this search engine and ask questions about it.

What specifically lays under “work-life balance” words? We asked our Senior Android Developer Jurate Talmontiene, a mom of three children and an enthusiastic wakeboarder/ surfskater/ snowboarder, to share her experience.

“I would say there are three main things that help me pay proper attention to my job, family and hobby: flexible working hours, the possibility to work remotely when I need it and support from my husband and colleagues.

When raising three children, there are always lots of things to take care of and there are three times more unexpected situations, and some of them require instant reactions. That’s why I’m happy to have the possibility to decide to work from home and to manage my work flexibly: to take time off whenever I need it and cover it when the time is good for me.

I had focused on children for quite some time and had no active hobby. Until during our annual Platform Conference last year when I tried wakeboarding. I kept falling off that evening, but I knew myself - if I can’t make something, I’ll try even more to do it. So I went to training later and fell in love with the board more and more since then. When the summer season was over, I tried surfskate. During the winter, I jumped on a snowboard - that’s how the board is with me all year round.

The flexibility at work and supportive colleagues help me maintain this hobby. Sometimes I join our daily stand-up meetings being near the lake and my team even agreed to reschedule these meetings 15 minutes later so I could make it! I have sports activities on my work calendar, so my colleagues know when I’m unavailable. I incorporate this hobby when going to the office as well. Before work or during lunchtime I can use perfect (smooth, sand-free) bike roads or try some tricks with surfskate at the public sports square near the office. The possibility of having active sports helps me recharge and relax because when I’m on board, I think of nothing else - just boarding."

Meet our people: Giedrius Sabaliauskas

Could you tell us what is one thing you like when working with us?
I’m a deeply technical person and I do like the possibility of solving various challenges through technical decisions a lot. If I see the possibility of improving something through the tech - I grab that opportunity. What I like the most is the possibility to work on something you find important for yourself and that will help benefit the entire company.

What was the first technical challenge you grabbed after joining the company?
When I joined the company 5 years ago, I saw the possibility of improving the code quality by applying my experience and the best practices in the CI flow, so I suggested this idea, and together with a few colleagues, we launched the proof of concept solution that was working fine for more than 4 years (yes, it was "temporary" PoC) until we migrated to GitLab. I'm happy my suggestions were heard and now automated testing is the common practice in the company.

How have things changed here over the years for you?
When I joined the company we were a team of 3 Samogitians and were working mostly with the product data and Partner Portal. The company was growing and the challenges related to the supply chain were growing as well. Over the years we consolidated a lot of business logic into new tools that automated a lot of processes and allowed our business people to work more efficiently with the same resources. Together with the tools, our amazing team was growing as well, so during the time I stepped up away from active programming and moved more towards management. The company allowed and helped me to grow and get more and more leadership skills, mentor, and build a team of professionals that I'm proud of.

Alex Wong came to Lithuania from sunny Spain and nine months ago joined our company as a Front-end Developer. Work in Lithuania team visited our office and talked with Alex about his journey into software development and what it’s like to relocate to Lithuania.

When asked what inspires him in his current job, Alex answered:

“What I like most about my job at the moment is the people I work with. At the point in my career I am right now, the people around me are the most valuable thing. My colleagues are very nice and friendly, but more importantly, they’re always willing to help. I know that here, I can work on many great projects in the future and have a lot of opportunities. But right now, the most important thing for me at work is my team.

This is my first job in software development, so it wasn’t easy at the beginning. It takes time to adapt and learn everything when you’re in a new place. But if your colleagues are supportive, it’s easier, and here, people are supportive. They’re always sharing their knowledge, not only within the team, but also with other teams. That’s very important. And if you have any doubts, problems, or issues, they always try to help you solve them.”

https://workinlithuania.lt/stories/alex-wong/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post

Alex Wong - Work in Lithuania Alex's story of switching from programming agricultural machinery back in Spain to developing front-end applications in Lithuania.

For the 11th year in a row, we had our traditional internal Platform Conference. It's like our festival celebrating knowledge sharing and bonding among cross-office tech teams. This time is for connection, reflection, and inspiration.

When our CTO Jesper Brøndum gave the conference's keynote speech, we saw the topics of the previous ones - it was like a reflection of the way we went through. "People", "Exponential", "Disruption", "Start-up mindset", "After the storm" - and this time our focus was on complexity. "Luckily it's difficult," Jesper started his talk, "it's a thing we have said a lot of times here at Boozt". It's interesting to work with complex challenges and it opens new possibilities. On the other hand, it has probably always been this way, we just stopped noticing that.

Two days were full of various know-how. We were happy to welcome external guest speakers from GitLab, Cloudflare, Slack, Adyen and Google. The other day was dedicated to internal talks - our colleagues prepared 12 presentations and 15 workshops. It was awesome to hear thoughts from colleagues in different offices - to learn their different approaches or realize that we think similarly.

Of course, the bonding was not only during the day - it continued in the evening. Volleyball, basketball, tennis, SPA or just chilling - whatever you prefer. And following discussions, stories, memories - with lots of fun and good mood. The absolute majority of us didn't want to go to our hotel rooms after the official evening celebration time - so we did not. We stayed together longer and created more memories and stories for the future.

Power to the people - as always!

We have the freedom to try new technologies and we're happy when someone takes the initiative. Andrejs Muzikovs, Staff Engineer at Boozt, together with two other colleagues, drives one of them - an internal Functional Language Club.

Established a month ago, it has already had five meetings/practical workshops among 28 members and focuses on social programming, knowledge sharing and personal development. The initial emphasis was on Elixir, a cool technology used in Platform since 2019.

This Thursday, Andrejs will remotely join VilniusPHP community from Sweden and share his presentation "Elixir - fun things you can do with pipes". When asked what to expect during the speech, he said: "In this talk I'll give an intro to Elixir. I will go through some of its coolest features, provide an insight into how we use it at Boozt, and give a comparison to PHP where it applies."

Marco Rosello moved to Lithuania and joined us six years ago as a Developer. Now he speaks Lithuanian and is a Web Development Director at Boozt.com. A journey not for everyone to succeed, right?

Well, when you get to know Marco - it all becomes clear. He is the one who takes responsibility seriously - may it be his personal life, integration into a new country or leading Boozt's technological branch in Vilnius.

Positive leadership, open and supportive working environment, work-life balance are not the only things that Marco finds important. He shares more of his thoughts in this interview while speaking Lithuanian and later switching to English.

https://www.delfi.lt/login/verslas/karjera/it-pasaulis-be-sienu-ispanas-marco-imasi-atsakomybes-ir-sekmingai-kopia-karjeros-laiptais-skandinaviskoje-darbo-kulturoje.d?id=90230117

IT pasaulis be sienų: ispanas Marco imasi atsakomybės ir sėkmingai kopia karjeros laiptais skandinaviškoje darbo kultūroje Pozityvi ir inovatyvi lyderystė, palaikantys, atvirai bendraujantys vadovai, skandinaviškas požiūris į darbo ir asmeninio gyvenimo balansą, multikultūrinė aplinka, sportas darbe per pertraukas – skamba kaip graži utopija, tačiau Lietuvoje gyvenantis ispanų kilmės Marco Rosello net ir n...

We missed meeting all together in person. Maybe that's why we had so many good emotions last Friday during our office-opening party.

No strict agenda or formalities - just several activities and the freedom to do whatever you want. Well, maybe the tricky quiz on our offices' history is worth special mention - oh, we weren't aware of many shockingly interesting stories 😂

It was awesome and we all were here - our alumni, management, long-standing colleagues and new joiners, even the ones who will join us in the nearest future. It felt like a good party among old pals.

Here are some photos to catch the mood - let's leave the rest between DJ and us.

We have no intention of growing our teams just in numbers. Instead, we want to grow more sustainably and discover experienced future colleagues who find Scandinavian working culture attractive. We intend to attract talent that shares our values - trust, freedom, responsibility - and we aim to work together for many years to come.

We had this in mind when selecting a new office and focused on one-team-size indoor spaces.

https://madeinvilnius.lt/verslas/nekilnojamas-turtas/skandinavijos-milzinai-boozt-isikurs-paupyje/

Skandinavijos milžinai „Boozt“ įsikurs Paupyje - MadeinVilnius.lt - Vilniaus naujienų dienoraštis Pirmaujanti Švedijos technologijų bendrovė „Boozt“ metų pradžioje Lietuvoje jau atidariusi mados ir interjero e. prekybos platformą ketina plėstis ir keliasi į naują biurą Vilniuje, kuriame dirbs 50 programinės įrangos specialistų. Antrasis pagal dydį įmonės technologijų padalin...