Meet Ned & Zak
You know there are only a few lucky ones that find their calling in life early on. Well, we - Ned & Zak were fortunate enough to have done this in the face of software craftsmanship.
I was still in school when I engineered, developed and deployed my first enterprise apps. I still remember the five-am-wake-up mornings, I had to pull up, so I could deploy that new fancy feature in the client’s data centre before everybody went to work, and before my first class began.
Ned started doing computers even earlier than me (actually, he was the one that introduced me to computers). It was in second grade when he started earning his first money by providing professional computer support service to companies around town.
For as dull as this might seem for most at this early age, for some reason, it was inspiring for us ... to see people use what you have engineered and how this actually obsoletes the cluttery and annoying repeating tasks from their daily routine, while at the same time empowers them to see and do more, has touched us deep. So deep that we kept doing this ever since ...
Enters Platform
Each one of us did work solo for quite a while. But on most of our weekend meetups, gym sessions, and going outs we ended up helping each other out by discussing projects, solutions & approaches to problems and clients.
So it wasn't long before we got the idea of establishing a joined venture. We registered a company back in 2011, and picked the name "Platform", because bespoke software platforms are what we ended up doing for most of our clients.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though, we’ve had our ups and downs as I believe every business does. Right now, we have a powerful team of software craftsmen, designers and advisers that we are proud of, but we had to go through two failed attempts in the past in order to get it right the third time.
We've also had our fair share of failed projects. Some of which took too much time, some engineered badly, and some were merely wrong from the beginning. But I believe this is how we gained the needed experience to pull up all of our successful ones. We now have the experience of not going too deep and wide in engineering, but deliver first and extend from thereon instead.
Platform OOD has been recognized as one of the a Top 10 Mortgage Solution Providers in Europe for 2021 by the Banking CIO Magazine. You can read more about our award here.
The Manifest has also identified us as the most reviewed software development company in Bulgaria for September 2022.
We Are Remote
We were working from home offices only and doing meetings with clients on their premises until 2013. We didn’t really need office space, but since everyone else was doing it, we decided to give it a go. A fair amount of capital was invested in a fancy office space, so we got the perk.
It turned out though that this didn't work out for us very well. We ended up doing our work at home where we were much more focused, while just visiting the office for chit-chat and casual work-related updates. So we decided to shut the office down after only two years of operation.
We've learned our lesson, so Platform is a remote-only enterprise ever since. We are doing regular team meetings for the casual work-related updates and socialising, but do most of our work from the comfort of our homes.
Our Contributions
We believe in giving back and frequently contribute to open source project that we rely on and some causes that feel close to us.
One of the open-source projects that we frequently contribute to is AgileToolkit. We rely on the frameworks in a lot of our project and feel obligated to give back. We do this with some library bug-fixes, giving away some small new modules or helping with merge requests. We also actively participate in the community by assisting new members in getting on track with the toolkit or providing feedback on some new features and general direction of things.
A cause that we felt close and contributed to was that of the Veranda Trend Foundation. This charity organization was established with the sole purpose of helping people with serious illnesses. Veranda's passion is to offer new, attractive, quality clothing while donating all proceeds to various causes. We were happy to provided an E-Commerce solution with all the needed tools free of charge.
Our Leadership
Thanks to the professional network we have grown over the years and the remote nature of our company, our team is dynamic. Because of that, we can source the required talent on every step of the process. We work on flexible terms with every team member: while a lot of us work as full-time employees, we have also guys working part-time (fixed hours), on a contract basis, on a project basis, on an hourly basis and so on.
In summary, we identify the required talent for the client’s project, we check with our team or tap our professional network for the right guys and try to work out individual terms that fits best all sides. We go through all this trouble so that we can get the work done while keeping both team members and the clients happy.