This January DevriX, the company I’m working for, turned 5. Mario and I started working together in the summer of 2010, although he founded the company in 2011, so technically, I’m with DevriX even before the company existed 🙂

 The beginning

The story begins back at the university just before the summer holiday. I didn’t have any plans and I was wondering what I’m going to do for the next couple of months. One day Mario called and asked me about my plans for the summer. He said that he has rented a room in a shared office and he asked me whether I’m interesting in an internship over the next few months. I didn’t have any professional development experience and I was looking for a job, so knowing Mario, his skills, ambition and attitude the decision wasn’t hard 🙂

At the beginning we were using CakePHP for our projects. I was reading the Cook Book, asking a bunch of questions, fighting with some basic stuff, while Mario was working on a few different projects in Django (I still remember that Homepage with the beautiful map and terrible UX :D), Python, Java and a few other platforms and languages. He was dealing with the client projects, while I was learning PHP, HTML and CSS and asking about pretty much everything. Soon thereafter I started to help with small tasks and assist with the project workflow. He was also teaching a few programming courses at large companies such as VMware, so I was helping out with presentations preparation and things like that.

 

A few months later he came at the office and asked me a few questions that made me think about our development workflow:

• What kind of components are we building for each project?
• Are we creating similar admin interfaces and CRUD logic for them in every project?
• Do we need to start from scratch every time?

We had a quick chat and he shared his vision of the future of the company and our technical process.

Since we had a previous experience with WordPress, we’ve decided to switch to WordPress full-time and make use of everything it provides by default. Shortly after the trial we’ve become a 100% WordPress development agency. That’s how I started using WordPress as a developer, not only as a user with a blog.

If you are interested in the story of the company, check our about page, where you can find a more detailed story about the company, the culture, the team and our technical background.

Fast-forward to today

Nowadays DevriX is a distributed company with a great team of ~20 employees from all over the world. We are working on different Software as a Service (SaaS) projects, large multisite networks, migrations, maintenance and ongoing WordPress Development for clients and partners from the US, Europe and Asia. Also we are working on a bunch of internal projects, plugins, themes, SaaS and some of them are going to be launched very soon, so I’m looking forward to share them with you!

Since we are a distributed company, we have the freedom to work wherever we want, so we do enjoy working from different coffices and places

Friday coffice (@ Starbucks w/ @no_fear_inc) http://t.co/D0fMX0wjVo pic.twitter.com/msecgeyXue

— Stanko Metodiev (@metodiew) May 30, 2014

Different Shisha bars

Hard work from the favorite coffice w/ @no_fear_inc pic.twitter.com/rhrvReDb59

— Stanko Metodiev (@metodiew) June 9, 2014

Team DevriX monthly HipChat meeting here while the core team is having drinks in a Hookah bar pic.twitter.com/7BslmVo1hK

— DevriX (@wpdevrix) September 22, 2015

but lately we spent more time at the new office 😉

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAon9CwnOk8/

The Future

The future is bright and I’m looking forward to see what’s going to happen. I’m expecting 2016 to be a very interesting year with tons of work, cool internal projects and services, different WordCamps, meetups and tech events. We also looking forward to hiring new team members, signing more retainer contracts with incredible partners and extend the service offerings for different audiences.

Thank you, Mario

And lastly, but not least I want to say a huge THANK YOU to Mario! Thank you for the motivation, for the inspiration, for the patience, for everything! You became a great friend and I do enjoy every second working with you. I consider myself to be as a lucky guy and I’m enjoying every second working with you and the  rest of the team, so once again – thank you!