What was 2015 like for Merixstudio?

If i had to summarize this year using 1 word, it would be GROWTH - it's clearly visible that our company ran as far away from the stagnation as possible. Currently Merixstudio employs more than 50 people, we created new departments within our structure and optimalised whole work of the office - a lot happens on Różana! Our system registered the creation of 114 new projects from Clients coming for the United States, Canada, the Great Britain, Australia, Japan or United Arab Emirates. Our portfolio now includes such projects as The Old Axolotl, Redpick, Playism or Touch & Go - as you can see, we were busy whole year! Due to the fact our COO prefer to have everything neatly written out, we chose a couple of points we found particurarly noteworthy:

Reasons to be proud of from 2015

• Kopanito flooded with awards
• Say hello to our new #award - Kopanito was officially the best #indie #game at #PoznanGameArena2015! We are really proud of our #gamedev team <3 #gamedevelopment #poznan #poznandev #happy #winner #thumbsup #indiegame #indiedev
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 19 Paź, 2015 o 3:19 PDT
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  Our shelves have passed the true stress test this year, because our office equipment now includes a large set of new prizes and awards! We owe this mostly to Kopanito, the arcade, 2D soccer game with HTML5-powered engine. The big part of this impressive result was achieved on the Pixel Heaven, which is one of the most important polish festivals dedicated to the gaming market. Our game developers returned home with as many as four awards: Retro Roots (best reference to retro), Bing Bang! (the biggest surprise), Best Gameplay and, the most relevant for us, the Grand Prix, the award given by the audience! We also had a lot of reasons to be happy in our hometown, on Poznan Game Arena, where Kopanito stand was besieged by curious players and where we received the title of the Best Indie Game!

• Keeping our blog at the highest level

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  But this is not the end our list! This year, we put a great emphasis on our blog – we wrote a lot of articles related to our industry, some of which were published in the newspapers or business portals . Our efforts (and sometimes working on tight schedule) paid off in the competition organized by blogifirmowe.com - we took the second place in the category of Professional Blog of the Year and won the Blog of The Year in the Medium-Sized Companies category! Merixstudio competed with 243 polish companies, so the greater the pride that our efforts to communicate with our customers has been recognized. We are constantly looking for new ideas for articles, with each entry we also learn something new – don’t forget to read our blog in 2016! ;)
• Reaching the podium on the Clutch.co
• For a few months we have been recieving reviews on @clutch.co - the website where clients can share their thoughs regarding our work. Right now we are on the first place in polish ranking of Top Web & Sotware Developers and on third place in international Top Web Development Companies classification! We are extremely proud and eager to work even harder and better (and faster and stronger) on our projects, so stay tuned! #clutch #webdevelopment #poland #review #proud #poznan #poznandev #interactiveagency
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 23 Lis, 2015 o 6:05 PST
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  Communication with the Client also means asking for feedback when the project is completed, what helps in constant development of our company. Because of that we attach a big importance to the reviews we receive on the Clutch.co and we are happy to say that our Customers described our cooperation with great enthusiasm! The opinions we received helped us in landing on the top of the Polish list of Top Web & Software Developers, and shortly after that we got on the podium in an international ranking of the Top Web Development Companies! It is particularly important for us is that these rankings are based only on opinions of our Customers - as you can see, a good cooperation is the key to success!
• Special Prize of the Jury at the EB Gala
• Proud owners of EB Kreator Award!
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 31 Gru, 2015 o 4:41 PST
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  The foundation of Merixstudio is based on our employees, thanks to whom the company operates like a well-oiled machine. Our industry is characterized by a large competitiveness, so we have to fight for the true talents. Our secret weapon this year was, among others, was the Merix Wars campaign, and thanks to that (as well as many other things we did this year) this December we won the Special Prize of the Jury at the EB Gala. The Jury explained that we received this award because of "the consistent, coherent, creative and low-cost approach to the business image and recruitment, as well as the demonstration how actions in the area of employer branding can support marketing goals". We can assure you that we are on the roll- we will probably surprise you again with our new crazy ideas!
• DevCollege
• We are having another #DevCollege #workshop in our office - this time Wiesiu and Adam are teaching about #Symfony2 - everyone would like to have teachers as nice as these two:) #poznan #symfony #backend #office #poznandev #webdevelopment
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 18 Lis, 2015 o 2:20 PST
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  The novelty, which currently is an integral element of our company, is Dev College, workshops on Web and Game-development. They are designed for people who have already had contact with the development - participants have the opportunity to expand their skills in technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, Node.js, Web Sockets, AngularJS, Django or Python. So far, we have organized four workshps with AKAI, the Internet Applications Academic Club:
  
• Real-time communication between via the WebSockets protocol
• Really painless Django development of web application
• Development Overture – the prelude to Symfony
• Drupal modules - the beauty and the efficiency, which is the beginning of history
• Meetings are conducted by our developers, who have a lot of experience in discussed topics. The whole course is very practical, participants work on codes, modules and applications - in the end there is no better way of learning than rolling up the sleeves and working under the supervision of specialists. After several meetings, we can happily admit that this format works really well - there are participants who took part in more than one meeting, which we take as confirmation that it is worth doing what we do! :) See you soon, look forward to the information about the next course on our Facebook!
• Internal initiatives (BTTF + Digital Signage + Merix Games)

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  In addition to working on projects of our Clients, this year we also spent some time on our internal initiatives. To Merixgames, which, as the name suggest it, is dedicated to game development, we added two new initiatives - Back to The Frontend and Digital Signage. The first one refers to Marty McFly form "Back to the Future" and his return to modern times – we chose 21.10.2015 (the date of the travel to the future from the movie) to release the website. Created website is fully dedicated to Frontend technologies – we love HTML5 so much that we had to express our feelings in the most effective way possible! ;) Marcin wrote about the creative process of working on creation of this initiative in one of our favorite articles on our blog - see for yourself how our Back to the Future came to life.
  This year we also showed you Digital Signage, our new brand that is oriented around the development of application and HTML5 games on Digital Signage systems, which are one of the fastest growing areas in the marketing industry. In this project our team has, among other, worked on the already mentioned Touch & Go, which allows customers to manage the contend displayed on digital signage screens using a smartphone (without having to download additional applications). The user scans the QR code to connect to the screen and be able to view and save the available materials (eg. offers of travel agencies). Kamil wrote in his article Creative use of new technologies in Digital Signage about the potential of advertising that lies in those technologies - see for yourself what it means to be a creative marketer!
• Internal workshops
• We love to improve our qualifications! Every week we have different #workshop - this time Maciek and Maciek (diversity of names is not our strongest asset) walked us through the details of #GoogleAnalytics. Thanks Guys! #knowledge #learning #google #poznan #poznandev
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 19 Lis, 2015 o 4:08 PST
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  As I wrote in the introduction, in 2015 we intensively worked on evolution of the company and sharing our knowledge. What help us in this are the trainings that we organize for ourselves! Each of us has some unique knowledge and skills that are worth sharing with the rest of the office. From a very good knowledge of Google Adwords, techniques of good communication with the customer to working on our development skills – this meetings are conducted at least once a week and help us in achieving good results described in the first paragraph of this list. ;) An important feature of the internal workshop is that it is conducted by coworkers, because of that we always have the opportunity to thoroughly discuss the subject and to ask questions even some time after the meeting is finished. I can’t even remember when was the last training-free week – it seems that we really like to learn a lot ;)
• Office parties
• Is somebody surprised that Marcin photobombed sombody? We are not :) #photobomb #officeparty #ChristmasPaety
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 14 Gru, 2015 o 1:53 PST
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  But we are not one of those squares who are focused solely on the work - this year we went out and had fun quite often! In addition to our favorite bowling we also had the opportunity to improve our skills in billiard or organize some barbecues in the summer. And when we did not want to leave the office, we just we ordered some pizza to the office and threw a mini-party in the kitchen. There were a lot of opportunities to step away from the desk – there was a Women's Day, Man’s Day, November 11 with its delicious rogale or Christmas Eve. Such meetings where we can just relax are in our opinion great for team-building - in the end nothing will strengthen the relationship more than working of a common, sometimes slightly embarrassing memories;)
• Out of the office
• Second group is on their way! #MIT2015
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 27 Lis, 2015 o 2:29 PST
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  In addition to internal trainings, we also had the opportunity to leave our comfortable office and attend courses, workshops and conferences. Sometimes it took us only a few minutes to arrive at conferences such as Marketing and Technology 2015 or Meet Magento Poland. We often traveled a little bit further, for instance to Warsaw for UX-PM training, or booked a plane to Barcelona for a Awwwards 2015 conference (where we had the opportunity to meet Tobias van Schneider!). It’s really important for us to never stop in expending our knowledge - this year especially two training programs we attended – the first one was about Test-Driven Development (organized by Code Sprinters), the second one was about the Scrum Master Training (organized by the Scrum Group). Every course is a very valuable addition to our company meetings – it is always worth knowing the point of view of people outside of Merixstudio!
• Great company is not only about working
• Our Marta, with a lovely smile on her face!
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 3 Lip, 2015 o 7:05 PDT
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  As you can see on our Instagram, we can’t stay serious for a long time. This year we had the opportunity to immortalize few shenanigans, such as nutscaping, criminal investigation with the scrunchie, artistic decoration of our desks or the doors of Backend Development room. We also shared our development knowledge with a really special intern – we were visited by Gacek, Maciek’s dog! For us the kitchen is a place where we are not only eating – quite often we play FIFA, Kopanito or Mortal Kombat there. Every day at noon you can stumble upon the Club of Board Games Fans meeting, whose scoreboard became a regular feature of our office.However, with all these foolery we did not forget about the people in need - in December there was a mobilization in the office due to the Noble Package charity. I can proudly say that my colleagues did a great job- for the whole month we were flooded with gifts! As you can see, we can do more than just make fools of ourselves on Instagram ;) The friendly atmosphere in the company is extremely important for us - in a lot of interviews with our employees it was considered to be the greatest advantage of working in Merixstudio. We are not afraid to work hard on projects, we set the bar high for ourselves, but we also try to remember that it is great people who make a great company. For this reason getting up every morning is not difficult for us - we know that even in the most complex tasks we can count on some help, and when we want to have a little break, there will always be someone willing to do something stupid together ;)
• 2016
• We had fun today with Daniel, our guest from Brasil! He is in Poznań to give a lecture at university and wondered how we work:) #friday #funatwork
• Zdjęcie zamieszczone przez użytkownika @merixstudio 8 Maj, 2015 o 6:18 PDT
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  A lot has happened this year, we were able to achieve our goals and pursue a lot of new ideas. We do not intend to slow down in 2016 – wehave a lot of plans for the next year! We really want to have more opportunities to meet you in person at various fairs, conferences and workshops. The nearest one will be at Poznan Offline Party (January 9th) - see you soon in Concordia Design!

All this was possible thanks to you, our Customers and business partners, because it was your projects and ideas that kept us growing! Do not let us have settled on our laurels - we guarantee that we will always keep up with the latest trends and technologies, so you can be sure that our work will fully meet all your expectations and that it will stand out from the competiton. We look forward to what 2016 will bring us - we wish you (and ourselves) that our collaborations will be as successful as usuall!