Boozt Technology Baltics

* 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…

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.

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.”

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."