I remember my interview, that I gave for English radio channel in Barcelona about current software trends and how Apiumhub became successful. I though it will be interesting for you to know the story of Apiumhub and the current software trends & best practices.
“English Radio” provides a mix of great music and stimulating interviews and conversations with guests from the broad spectrum of the English-speaking community in Catalonia. Friday morning from 9 am to 10am with Katrina Logie and Sam Mednick. Interviews with successful companies based in Barcelona and individual guests talking about their ideas and businesses.
We started our interview with the following questions:
What is Apiumhub and what are our core services
Apiumhub is a tech hub that connects great minds. It creates a tech ecosystem and brings together software architects & developers to provide you with the best team to help you transform your idea into a powerful and scalable product. We build goal-driven working software.
We have a team of highly skilled web developers, IOS developers, Android developers and software architects that want to make an impact on the tech industry, putting quality in the center of the process.
Now our core searvices are:
Mobile App Development. We develop native iOS and Android apps with Kotlin and Swift that add value to your business. We pay special attention to software architecture, scalability and best practices.
Web Development. We build robust web platforms, having expertise in a big range of technologies, such as: Scala, Java, Kotlin, Nodejs, .Net, React, etc. We help your project either take off or evolve.
Software Architecture. We define and implement the software architecture that best fits your digital product to ensure platform scalability, high performance and cost reduction.
Agile Product Owner. We accelerate innovation and ROI. We have enormous experience in defining, building, and delivering high quality digital products. Transparency and communication are key to ensure project success.
DevOps. We have enormous experience in DevOps consultancy, environment building and automation, dockerization, deployment automation, continuous delivery and performance tests.
Data-Driven Solutions. We design and develop new intelligent solutions, we analyze the behaviour and the use that users make of them, and we scale them in an optimal and efficient way.
QA Software Test Automation. We offer the full spectrum of QA services, from building a coherent QA software test automation strategy to leveraging best practices in Agile testing, continuous integration and test-driven development to enable you to get new digital services to market faster, expand market coverage, and respond more quickly and efficiently to market feedback.
And also we cover the whole technical cycle of digital product development. Sometimes we really develop tech products from scratch. And this is our strong point here. We are capable of working on the project from 0 or working on a particular area of it. We really adapt to the customer’s needs proposing best way to achieve their goals.
Second question was:
How was Apiumhub funded?
Apiumhub’s founders all worked for important big companies like Roche, Aigues de Barcelona, NTR, Intersystems, Ono, Telefónica, Accenture, etc., due to our own experience, we were all aware of the advantages you get by working in big global companies, but as all of us had faced situations where we had to work with a lack of agility, flexibility or even endless timings for any modification, meetings and more meetings made it exhausting and impossible to feel satisfied with our work, we decided to join forces and open a new digital service oriented company.
Success formula of Apiumhub
We put quality in the center of our product development. We use agile methodologies; scrum, CI & TDD, always working with short iterations & making all advancements visible throughout the process. Apart from that, to deliver a working software, we cover the whole process of development by collaborating with different companies, each one specialized in its own field.
We are the only ones in Barcelona who work using the following secret formula:
We are big fans of Agile development;an approach to project management. We work with 2 weeks sprints, and start each sprint with “user stories” that we determine with the customers, it’s basically specific tasks to complete during the sprint. At the end of each sprint we do a demo, where client can see working functionalities, the idea is to do the most important features, and then add on them, instead of just delivering a product by the end of the project and incurring the risk of having to rework things that could have been avoided. Every day we are in touch with a client and he has control over the whole project because we use a program called JIRA which basically gives visibility to the client and lets him know what we’re doing and where we are with the project, which is something they usually appreciate a lot. By using Agile methodology, we improve project predictability, we adapt to the changes, we focus on business value, we reduce risk of failure and we deliver product to the market faster than others. So client gets ROI faster.
In fact, we are always transparent with our clients and one of the most important things is that every member of our team manages the project as if it were his own product.
We believe in continuous evolution. We are always searching for new technologies or paradigms that will help us to improve the quality and speed of our work, and that has been attracting new talented professionals, which has made the business scalable.
Today, we are not only have clients from different industries with different projects, but we also have clients from all over the world.
It has not always been like it is right now. It took us time to find the best way of doing business in a scalable and effective way. For example, at the very beginning, we tried to adapt to the client as much as we could. But now, we believe that it is much more effective to bring him to our side. What I mean by that, is that by making the client use our tools and methodology for project management, establishing requirements and deadlines, we deliver the project in a more efficient way.
The trends and best practices in software development
Microservices
Docker
DDD
TDD
CI
SOLID
Predictions
We are pretty sure, that in the future data science will be one of the most demanded services.
Our idea is to keep growing our data science department, launch architecture solutions, mvp prototypes, which could be easily adapted to the clients needs, reducing development costs. One of these solutions is VYou app – user management and access management solution.
Ekaterina Novoseltseva is an experienced CMO and Board Director. Professor in prestigious Business Schools in Barcelona. Teaching about digital business design. Right now Ekaterina is a CMO at Apiumhub - software development hub based in Barcelona and organiser of Global Software Architecture Summit. Ekaterina is proud of having done software projects for companies like Tous, Inditex, Mango, Etnia, Adidas and many others. Ekaterina was taking active part in the Apiumhub office opening in Paseo de Gracia and in helping companies like Bitpanda open their tech hubs in Barcelona.
Apiumhub brings together a community of software developers & architects to help you transform your idea into a powerful and scalable product. Our Tech Hub specialises in Software Architecture, Web Development & Mobile App Development. Here we share with you industry tips & best practices, based on our experience.
