Our new year's resolutions for 2015

2014 has been an amazing ride. It has seen us incorporating MarsBased, signing our first clients, speaking at conferences, building big projects, mentoring at IronHack, working for the Barcelona City Council, leading Startup Grind & Startup Circle, hiring our first employees and many other amazing achievements.

In fact, we're preparing a detailed review of 2014 for you all to enjoy and discover what's been going on in the MarsBased spaceship.

While the 2014 post is being baked, we'll share with you our new year resolutions for this promising 2015!

In our first meeting of the year, everybody was asked what his resolutions for 2015 were, both personal and professional. Most of the resolutions are strongly related to our first months at MarsBased and/or our previous jobs, so we will be providing a little background to help you understand our resolutions better.

This does not only help us bonding with each other, but it is also part of our new strategy of publishing more blog content and providing more transparency as a company (inspired in the Buffer folks, who are doing a terrific job at helping new companies delving into corporate transparency).

In no particular order, here's what the Martians pledged to achieve in 2015.

Xavier Redó - CTO

Xavi started the year joining his previous company, GNuine, because we didn't know we'd be able to recruit him so early. Our best guesstimates assumed we'd have to wait until the end of the year to have him working full-time.

This past year has seen Xavi working hard to cope with all the projects we've gotten at MarsBased, therefore his resolutions are:

Xavier Redó Fundador & CTO

Technologically speaking, I would like to be able to invest more time in exploring new technologies and frameworks to help us face the constant request of mobile apps.

Secondly, I would like to identify repeating patterns in our development processes in order to extract libraries we can reuse in the forthcoming projects and open source them when possible.

Leaving tech aside, I would like to participate more in events and conferences. I think I can add value in initiatives whose goal is to provide formation to new developers.

Actually, I can also provide interesting content online, so I will be contributing more to the MarsBased blog. We've gathered some interesting results in 2014, and I would like to publish them and share them with our followers and the Rails community.

Finally, something I would like to improve is my time allocation skills. I am pretty accurate at guesstimating all the needed resources for each project, but so far I haven't included all these side-projects into my agenda. Here's to a 2015 for improvement!

Emilio Ríos - Developer

Emilio joined us barely a month and a half ago. But in our eyes, feels like he's been with us for all the ride. He is combining his internship at MarsBased with finishing his studies at La Salle.

Emilio Rios

Since I have not been programming for long - at least not professionally - I would like to commit to improving my programming skills in 2015. Inspired by John Resig, my new year resolution is to produce code every day of the year.

Now that my teammates depend on me, I want to learn as much as possible to be helpful to them!

Javier Pérez - Developer

Javi joined MarsBased at the beginning of Q4, in early October. Having worked at VASS together with Àlex, he transitioned from a full-time corporate J2EE consultant to an Angular & Rails developer.

Same as Emilio, feels like he's been forever with us!

Javier Pérez

I would like to master Rails in the coming months so that I can be 100% autonomous in the projects I am assigned to. This way, I will also be able to explore new techniques & trends on my own.

By acquiring more knowledge on Rails, I will be able to spot recurring patterns that I can turn into libraries for our projects.

On a personal side, and when I will be more autonomous, I would like to travel more. I want to enjoy this freedom of schedule we've got and visit places I haven't been to!

Last, but not least, I would like to keep my condition of being single :)

Àlex Rodríguez - CMO

I started 2014 in San Francisco, having then recently quit my previous job at VASS, where I worked with Javi - actually, we were in the same project, sitting next to each other.

After some weeks wandering around the city-cradle of entrepreneurship, I returned to Barcelona and got the Barcelona Startup Map project. That gave us the opportunity of employing me full time at the end of Q1, despite the fact that we were bootstrapping.

So here are my resolutions:

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit Fundador & CEO

2014 was a year of working hard to meet all the deadlines & cover all the areas of creating a company. I balanced my area's tasks (sales/marketing) with all sorts of other operational tasks to keep the development team focused.

This year I want to work smarter by focusing on my own areas (sales/marketing), while helping others improve in theirs.

Also, in terms of pushing my marketing skills to the next level, I want to learn graphic editing as well as improve my writing skills, publishing blog entries more often.

In terms of achievements, I would like to land a couple of big projects this year (if possible, from abroad). Also, I will be devoting more time to our presence in events, besides strengthening our relationship with Startup Grind & Startup Circle.

Jordi Vendrell - COO

Jordi is the third founding member at MarsBased. However, due to his duties as a Technical Director at Green Data and having a child last year, he couldn't join MarsBased until now. He's joining full-time on February, 9th.

Last year, he spent it balancing his position at Green Data, some hours during the weekends for MarsBased and his condition of first-time father.

Jordi Vendrell Fundador & COO

I only ask that on 2015 I will be able to combine professional and personal life better: spend more time with my family, get fit and keep doing a great job.

As for MarsBased, I would like to produce a new version of our corporate website that stands up to our status nowadays. It has to be a kick-ass website! Also, I'm looking forward to being more involved in the operative work of the company.