Projects, office moves and new team members

January 2013

Since I last managed to find time to scribble a few words about life at Manifesto plenty has changed…

Firstly, we’ve moved in to a new office, it’s by the canal in Angel. We’ve added a whiteboard wall to share ideas on, bought a mini fridge to chill thirst quenching beverages and held a little pre-Christmas get together that ended at a Roachford gig.

I won our “who can use their old laptop the longest” contest – this means I’ve had to work the longest on a PC with a broken space bar and intermittent left mouse click. On the plus side I now have a lovely Macbook Air, on the minus my 20 years of PC usage means I’m not very good on the Mac – I’m still writing this on the old beast (*stabs space bar).

Team

The team has grown since last year, currently it’s a little something like this…

• Simon, Curtis and I (yep, we’re all still here)
• David joined us last year as a Software Engineer/Consultant – he’ll be working on FatWire/WebCenter Sites (WCS) and java projects but has already been getting stuck in to some mobile development.
• Rabbia also joined us last year as a Software Engineer/Consultant to work with these java and Fatwire/WCS, she’s also already been setting up cloud servers for a number of other projects.
• Anna joined us in December to keep the office,  finance and HR running smoothly
• Louise started in the new year to manage projects and help us set up the processes that make sure we deliver
• Rich is developing excellent applications in a mixture of PHP and Ruby
• Stuart is developing beautiful responsive HTML5, CSS3 and JS interfaces and web applications
• Adam is managing PHP, WordPress and Drupal projects
• Bojan has just started in the team to work on FatWire/WCS projects
• Matthew is maintaining a number of our WordPress sites
• Jamie is helping us with SEO and copywriting
• Ryan, Paul and Katie have all contributed creative/design to projects this year.

Projects

We’re currently working on several Drupal and FatWire projects we’ll share links and news as they go live on the Manifesto Twitter account.

The big project news for the last 3 months has been the amazing success of Dryathlon. The campaign signed up many more users than its target and to date has raised over 2 million pounds for Cancer Research UK’s life saving work.

Company news

We’ve been doing some research work, programming Arduino chips to interact with mobile apps, talking about a Binaural horror film and a project related to the film Into Darkness.

We’re preparing to take our first product On Tour to SXSW as part of UKTI’s SXSW mission and Rich has been busy getting the first version of the app up and running.

We’ve also setup our monthly mini fridge and weekly fruit orders and so hopefully we’re working in a healthier more refreshed way.

On the recruitment front we’ve started looking for a Senior Designer/Creative and a PHP developer – if you’re interested fill in the contact form (direct applications only via this route please).

Jim