Working for Brightbox
When Jeremy and John started Brightbox in 2007, their focus was on doing things right – creating a great Ruby on Rails hosting platform, providing excellent customer service and making sure they, and their growing team, had a comfortable, productive working environment, free from the bureaucracy and frustrations of normal office life.
Work from home
We mostly work from home – we don’t need to sell the joys of working from home. It’s great.
We’ve got plenty of systems in place to make the most of teleworking – a private Jabber server for short, daily meetings & chat throughout the day; VOIP conference calls; Redmine for project management; and a private wiki for documentation.
Our Leeds office
At the moment, since all the team is based around Yorkshire, we have weekly team meetings at our office in Leeds. The office is just outside Leeds city centre and is easily accessible – there’s free parking and it’s on good public transport links from around the city.
We use our day in the office to catch up on what we’ve all been working on, for project/sprint planning, for pair programming and for training if needed. We also drink a lot of good tea and eat good food (often pizza).
The team is free to use the office throughout the week as well, if they fancy a change of scene or want to work together on something specific.
SCRUM-style development
We use SCRUM-style practices for our development project management – we’ve taken the bits that are most useful to us and left out the jargon & the filler.
We work in focused sprints, no more than a fortnight at a time, with planning & review meetings at the start and end of the sprint, and daily catch-up meetings throughout the run.
Support for the RoR and FOSS communities
We wouldn’t be where we are today without the work of the Ruby on Rails and FOSS communities and so we do what we can to support them.
We commit time and resources to make useful tools and scripts. We release libraries and full applications. We support grassroots events both financially & logistically as well as through attending meetings & contributing to mailing lists.
The Brightbox Team
Every member of Team Brightbox is an expert in their field. The team shares knowledge & skills through pair-programming & co-working sessions, and everyone is encouraged to help shape the future of the business. We’re all hilariously funny too.
Brightbox as a business
From the outset, Brightbox has been a financially stable company, growing organically rather than in the boom & bust cycles common to VC-funded start-ups. Now in our third year, we’re in a strong financial position to keep growing and are currently working on our next generation of products.
We’re working with some great partners too: we work with New Relic to provide monitoring for our customers and ClimateCare to offset our CO2 emissions – we’ve been carbon neutral as a company since 2007.
