Our new series Black Inside gives insights into everyday agency life at Blackbit. We start with Dennis, who we asked about his job.
Hi Dennis. Thanks for taking the time. Can you briefly introduce yourself? How long have you been at Blackbit and in what position?
Sure. I'm Dennis Korbginski and I've been with Blackbit at the Göttingen location for 13 years, now as Head of Application Development.
What does your daily work routine and that of your tribe look like?
We have built a great team and work together in a relaxed, family atmosphere. Everyone is approachable for their colleagues and we like to support each other. We see our projects through from ideation and conception to completion and, of course, beyond, because a project is rarely completely finished.
That sounds very dynamic. Now we're curious: What's it like for you to work in an agile organization?
In my experience, anyone who decides to take a job as a developer enjoys the creative process, i.e. analyzing a problem and coming up with one or more possible solutions, weighing them up against each other, implementing them and constantly optimizing them. As an agile organization, we offer exactly the right environment for this. Everyone can contribute their own ideas and experience to our projects. Since every project has individual requirements, finding creative solutions is one of the most important characteristics for developers at our company. We have fast, non-bureaucratic decision-making processes: Want to try a new tool, take a training course, or attend a conference? It's all just a quick conversation over coffee away. For us, every new colleague is always an opportunity to learn something new and to reflect on and improve our existing processes and procedures.
All right! Tell us a bit about the technology stack you work with in the team?
I'd love to! I'll try to keep it short: We develop our applications in PHP based on Symfony and with MySQL as database. We use Pimcore, itself a Symfony bundle, as the central building block for data and asset management.
For frontend development, we use Twig for more classic templating, Vue.js for headless applications - or a combination of both. For styling, we rely on Tailwind.
On the infrastructure side, we use Docker and Kubernetes and use AWS as our cloud provider. Our repositories are on Github and we use Github Actions for our CI/CD pipelines. Everything else is project dependent. So you can also get in touch with Elasticsearch, React Native or other technologies. Always stay flexible!
Speaking of flexible - the digital revolution is growing exponentially. How do you stay up to date?
I often learn about new technologies, frameworks and tools on blogs or through YouTube. If something sounds interesting, I exchange ideas with my colleagues, because maybe someone has already worked with one of the tools and can report on their experiences. For this purpose, we have regular TechTalks, where we exchange information about new technologies within the agency. Here we also discuss experiences from the projects of the various teams and jointly define best practices for our workflows.
There are also formats for exchanging experiences beyond the development plate, for example our Barcamp. We get together across the company in large groups and exchange ideas about the processes and collaboration between project management, graphic designers, the social media team, the developers, and our search engine marketing experts.
Every project is different, there's no template we can follow, so it's important for everyone in development to know what challenges the other teams have already faced and how they went about it. That way we can draw on each other's wealth of experience.
You've been with Blackbit for quite a long time. What still challenges you today?
The project work and the ever-changing requirements are what make this job so exciting and challenging. That won't change, because after all, we don't sell a finished product that just needs a little tweaking. We create individual solutions.
In every company, every industry, every country, there are different processes and requirements for which we have to find the best possible digital solution. I'll say it again: always stay flexible.
Thank you for your time. To conclude, we have three quick questions: 1. Away from digital - would you rather have coffee or tea?
Tea. Tea and espresso!
2. home office or headquarters?
Headquarters! I like being in the office because I value the personal contact with colleagues. Quite a few problems are solved during a short chat at the coffee machine.
3. GIFs or smileys?
Hm, sending smileys is much faster, but some situations just call for a GIF.
Thank you, Dennis!
You like what Dennis tells us? Then go ahead, we are looking forward to receiving interesting applications for our open positions! By the way, the complete interview is also available on YouTube.
Or do you want to learn more about us? Then simply download our info sheet About Blackbit
. In it we introduce ourselves directly to you - with all the details!
Disclaimer: For reasons of better readability, the interview does not use the masculine and feminine forms of speech simultaneously and uses the generic masculine. All references to persons apply equally to all genders.
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