Looking back to sprint forward

With the end of the year in sight, we tend to look back on the past days, weeks and months. Another year has flown by and next year we will celebrate our tenth anniversary! But before we pop the champagne to welcome the new year, let us pause and reflect on why 2021 will live on in our memories.

Some new faces and interns are here to stay

Internships are traditionally an important part of the first half of the year. 2021 has been very good for us in that respect. The interns this year were again of excellent quality! This year, for the first time, we have welcomed a design intern to strengthen our team. In addition, five other trainees started their careers with us, three of whom became permanent employees. We are happy to see how the experiences from the internships have directly influenced their career paths. We are already looking forward to the new interns of next year! Make sure to contact us if you’re interested.

Growing our development and design team was not our only focus this year. We have also welcomed Pieter, an ambitious marketeer with a strong focus on growing our brand. You might already have noticed his work on our socials. Since his arrival, he has already added 27 different posts on our various channels. Impressive!

Improvise, adapt, overcome: Team building edition

We all hoped that the COVID-19 pandemic extravaganza would have become a thing of the past by 2021. Unfortunately, we are still fighting this nasty virus. Classic team buildings as in the pre-covid era are still almost impossible. But nevertheless, we took up the challenge and were able to organize two covid safe team building activities!

First, we arranged a team building in June. Before we could start the festivities and snacks, everyone had to take a (negative) self-test. This way we could guarantee a safe party for everyone! You can read more about our first team building here. For our second team building, we wanted to make up some lost time as a team during past lockdowns. Therefore, we went on a workation for not just a day, but a full week! We spent a whole week in a villa in the Ardennes and had a blast! That's definitely something we should do more often! Maybe again next year?

Another thing that has been greatly reduced this year are our classic game nights. A staple of our team activities. Just casual get-togethers with snacks and fun games. But due to the lockdown sagas, we were forced to host these game nights online. From our own home. We only managed to organise a game night twelve times. Let’s crank that number up next year! Even though online games are fun, we missed the social aspect. And, of course, the snacks that go with it.

Work, work, work

But it's not all fun and games, we obviously worked this year too. So let's cover some key figures. We welcomed seven new team members to four different teams in 2021. In addition, our developers have resolved more than 8.500 Jira tickets this year and fixed at least three bugs over lunch.

It has been a busy year with a lot of new challenges and opportunities. Even though we are looking back a little melancholically at the fun times we had, we are looking forward to the new year! May the next year be even better than the last! We hope you'll join us on the rollercoaster called 2022! Hopefully a 2022 with a lot less restrictions!