What's it like, working at Ibuildings?

Working at Ibuildings is challenging but always fun. We have a great team of experts working on a variety of projects, ranging from development to high-level consultancy.

Below you will meet some of our experts. What does their average day look like (if there is such a thing as an average day at Ibuildings)? What are the challenges they face?

Martin Roest - Professional Services Consultant

What do you do at Ibuildings?
My job as a Professional Services Consultant at Ibuildings consists of high level support from small to large enterprise companies. In order to help a customer decide on future and existing plans, I often do a review and/or audit on their application architecture and infrastructure. My expertise is focused on high performance and highly available, clustered environments supporting the complete LAMP stack.

Why do you like working at Ibuildings?
I've found my work at Ibuildings very challenging. We are a flexible and dynamic company always searching to improve things. We work in relatively small teams, which allow you to really develop yourself. I have very nice and skilled colleagues whom I enjoy working with, and we often hang out together to have some fun or to do cool stuff like sky diving.

What cool projects have you worked on at Ibuildings? 
In the time I have been with Ibuildings, I've worked on many cool projects. Personally I prefer working with clients that have a long relationship with Ibuildings. Often, in this type of situation, we do lots of smaller to large projects and really have a good understanding of the client and their needs. Examples include Kieskeurig, Provincie Zeeland and RP Holidays. For Provincie Zeeland and Roompot, we not only develop and support their PHP applications, but have also delivered and are responsible for their hosting environment.

Ivo Jansch - CTO

What do you do at Ibuildings?
I have several roles at Ibuildings. Besides being CTO of the company, I'm also a software architect and a consultant. This means I operate a lot in the areas where technology and business meet. Part of my role is to represent Ibuildings, to customers, partners, and the php community. This allows me to travel to interesting places and present various topics to a variety of audiences. I'm also the author of the book 'php|architect's Guide to Enterprise PHP Development', which finds its roots in the way we do projects at Ibuildings, so it will give you a glimpse of what working at Ibuildings is like.

Why do you like working at Ibuildings?
What I've always liked is that as technology evolves, Ibuildings does, too. By continuously applying new technologies and new products, our job is never the same and never boring. To make sure that all our developers continue to learn, we do 'competence management' at Ibuildings. This means we keep track of skills and help people learn new things. We also stimulate this by doing monthly workshops, where the developers of Ibuildings meet and together learn about new developments in technology. And last but certainly not least, I like the fact that I can work with some of the smartest people, and that in turns allows us to work on very challenging projects.

For an inside look, follow me on twitter.

Dennis Jan - Professional Services Consultant

What do you do at Ibuildings?
As a Professional Services Consultant I'm focused on training and onsite development & support. Working with small to large companies, I will train their people with the latest skills and techniques of software development. After analysing the results of the brainstorming session and the interviews with the students, I develop a course plan. After that, the real job begins: training the people. Another part of the job is onsite development & support. Some customers likes exclusief high quality support of theirs php applications onsite. It means all kind of support, implementing new features, help them with some complex IT challenges or just some content management. Besides onsite support onsite development is also one of the daily tasks. When a customer has a IT challenge or just some capacity problems I'm able to help them developing the right solution. As a professional service consultant you have many roles, sometimes i'm the sales person, the architect, the leaddeveloper, the developer or just an advisor. That's what I like about my job!

Why do you like working at Ibuildings?
Ibuildings is a very young and dynamic company. I have great colleagues and it is great to work with the best. Working at Ibuildings is always challenging, every time you need to be one step ahead. Ibuildings always gives you the opportunity to develop yourself and your skills of knowledge. So you'll become one of the best, too!

What cool projects have you worked on at Ibuildings?
Do you know companies like Volkskrant, Tros, Aces Direct? I have trained their people! For Universiteit Leiden I did some onsite development at their research department. Together we developed an application which predicts the behavior of a medicine on a human without the need to test it first on an animal. For the Koninklijke Bibliotheek I developed an application to search reports of our government from 1814 till 1995. Or Webwereld.nl also an amazing job, as the lead, we developed together with IDG that website. As a matter of fact I've done a lot of cool projects.

Lorna Mitchell - Software Engineer

What do you do at Ibuildings?
Most of the time I'm a developer, but I also have part of my time dedicated to overseeeing some of Ibuildings' community activities, and on other days I deliver consultancy or training courses to clients. I'm the editor of techPortal, our developer portal site, so I get to help our developers to write and get published there. I also look after our speakers, often speak myself at conferences, and host events run by Ibuildings such as the Dutch PHP Conference. I'm very lucky to be able to combine so many different roles into one day job!

Why do you like working at Ibuildings?
I could list so many reasons but most of all my developer colleagues and the projects we get to work on. The people I work with are some of the brightest sparks in the industry and they have a great attitude to supporting one another; between us we have experts in so many different areas and I learn so much from seeing these people working and the solutions they implement. My job has adapated to allow me to expand some of my wider skills, such as presenting and organising events, and I feel like I've really developed as a person and found new strengths - as well as rising to the technical challenges and stimulating projects I've worked on. Often strong programmers outgrow their challenges and/or move into management - I don't have to do either.

What cool projects have you worked on at Ibuildings?
Getting paid to do community stuff is brilliant - DPC is a major feature in my calendar and techPortal is such a great site to be involved with! I've also had some cool technical projects that I've really enjoyed, implementing services for identity at five.tv for example, and dealing with database structures and migrations on complex data sets. I get a real buzz from working with our training clients as well, when you create bespoke training for a client that you've met and worked with, and their team walk out the door at the end of the week armed with new knowledge and the experience of the exercises I've created - its a special and rewarding experience.

Harrie Verveer - Software Engineer

What's your job at Ibuildings? 
My business card says 'Software Engineer', which basically means that I work on projects as a programmer and sometimes carry out some architectural tasks as well. Besides that I do a lot of on-site jobs for our customers. The reason for on-site projects can be anything. For example, the customer might need some extra capacity to get the project done in time, or they might be building something very important and they want to have an Ibuildings lead programmer to make sure that the project is built the way it should. In most cases, they don't just want me to type away and keep my mouth shut; they want me to explain what I'm doing and why I'm doing it so they can learn from it.

Why do you like working at Ibuildings?
The high level of innovation and cool projects makes Ibuildings a great employer to work for. We are constantly learning and always exploring new stuff. Besides that there is almost no bureaucracy, and you won't see many people in suits when you walk around the offices. Most Ibuildings developers are really passionate about what they do and want to discover new cool stuff all the time. It's great to be a part of such a team!

What cool projects have you worked on at Ibuildings? 
I think one of the project I worked on that everybody knows is nu.nl, the biggest news website in the Netherlands. This was a very interesting project because of the huge amount of visitors. The website might look simple on first sight but in this case the looks are deceiving; there was quite some work to be done 'under the hood' to make sure the website would stay online when there was some breaking news that required the webservers to handle more than 20 million page views in half a day. Besides that I've worked on a project where we created a search engine for the Royal Dutch Library that enabled them to search through their massive databases using a webinterface.

Mikko Koppanen - Professional Services Consultant

What do you do at Ibuildings?
I am one of the professional services consultants in the UK. My daily work involves visiting Ibuildings' customers, helping them work through various technical challenges. I've also conducted audits on security and performance, and given technical support to our sales team. Sometimes I even get my hands dirty with writing some code, too.

Why do you like working at Ibuildings?
I have been working at Ibuildings since we were just starting up in the UK, and it has been great to witness the rapid growth of the company. I've been part of the team recruiting a few good people as well. The best thing about the work itself is that I get to work on a wide variety of interesting and varied projects, and often get to choose the things I like to do. The atmosphere is flexible, so if I feel like coding during the night, it's quite often OK. And of course there's the free Coke...

What cool projects have you worked on at Ibuildings?
I've been doing high-level consulting at BBC, which consisted of helping to build their development platform, improving performance and scalability, and writing documentation. I've given training on Zend solutions at Web Reservations International, and consulted at Ladbrokes. And at one customer site, I made Mediawiki work fluently on Oracle. We've also had a couple of projects where Imagick has been used, and as its lead developer, it has been refreshing to see that your open source solutions are actually used in business-critical applications.

Would you like to join us?

If you would like to be part of our team, have a look at our job openings. Our recruitment process can be tough, but once you get through, you get to work on exiting projects in a team of highly skilled, enthusiastic professionals.