The MarsBased team grows bigger: the abduction

Tuesday, October 7th will be a date to remember for all the Martians.

The last few months, we have been swamped with work. Far from being a quiet and relaxed summer, the MarsBased flagship has been advancing at cruise speed. And to face the coming months, we have hired a new developer.

Here's what we did in our first day with him.

In the last chapter of The MarsBased Diaries...

During the summer, we have been working non-stop to make MarsBased grow bigger, looking for larger projects that would allow an organic and sustainable growth of the company.

Turns out, one of the first contacts we ever made as MarsBased reached out and hired us for a very ambitious project.

The project is big. So big that Xavi, our CTO, could not complete it on his own in the given dates. So we hired a new Martian called Javier Pérez, who has an extensive background in IT consulting and web app development. Plus he's got a beard.

The Abduction

Because we're a remote working company, we do not have a physical office. We always meet our clients at their offices and seldom hold any get-togethers by now. So we went out for some coworking at one of the best venues in town: Start2bee.

Javi is our first hire at MarsBased, so we made sure we gave him the best possible welcoming to the company.

He showed up with his new & shiny Macbook Pro and after having read the Martian Playbook, prepared for a day-long session of initiation.

The session kicked off with a formal presentation of the company: who we are, what are our working methods and what do we offer as a company.

We then reviewed the MarsBased Playbook to emphasize the importance of communication and mutual understanding in distributed teams. It is important for new hires to interiorise the playbook in order to get them started with our company culture.

Finally, the first half of the coworking session ended with a review of the company history, project by project, to help understand our progress as a company up until now.

After lunch, we started rolling: Xavi and Javi teamed up to start pair-programming while the rest of the team worked on project definition and estimations for potential clients.

Immediate future

Our biggest challenge is to integrate Javi into the MarsBased culture & working methods as soon and natural as possible.

His challenge is to help us achieve the goals we've set, that we couldn't achieve without him, while bringing a whole lot of expertise in JavaScript to our tech stack.

And for that, he (also) got a corporate coffee mug.

Welcome aboard, Javi.

PS: Xavi and Javi will be pair-programming during the next weeks at Start2bee a couple of days a week. Drop by to say hello, if you're around!