First things first – how long have you been a 67 Bricker?
I started in 2013, so I’ll be coming up to nine years this summer. I think one of the reasons I’ve been here so long is that you get to work on a variety of different projects with different customers and different technologies so things don’t tend to get stale. Sometimes working in one company can mean that you get a little stuck, but here there’s always a chance to do something different. You can get enough variety to keep it interesting.
What was your path here – what were you doing before, and why did you apply to join us?
I was working for a small music streaming start-up which was called We7, which no longer exists. That was a real insight into the music industry! I’d been there a couple of years and done a few interesting things but didn’t feel like I was getting to do anything new. They’d also been taken over by Tescos and the culture was becoming quite corporate, so I felt like I wanted a change. I already knew Inigo (our then CTO) as I had previously run a book group where we’d meet in a pub and talk about books on agile software development and he used to come along to that. So I think I put a message out to my network saying I was looking for something new and one of my contacts replied and said ‘how about the company run by Inigo’.
I had an initial phone interview which in my mind went fairly terribly, but for some reason they wanted to see me in person, and so I turned up at their office in the Innovation Centre in Oxford. There were several companies all based there and someone came out to the reception and said ‘Oh Chris, you’re here for an interview?’. I dutifully followed thinking ‘something doesn’t seem quite right’ and it turned out it was a completely different company! They were also expecting a Chris to be interviewed, so I almost ended up somewhere else entirely. Luckily I went back to the reception and then Inigo came out to meet me and I had the interview with 67 Bricks as planned!
What are some of your favourite things you’ve worked on?
I’ve done lots of different things. One thing that comes to mind is we worked with a publisher who had a vast quantity of pdfs of books – thousands of them. They wanted to sell individual chapters, but they didn’t have pdfs of the chapters alone. They needed us to take the full book pdfs and chop them up, but they had no useful data about how many chapters there were, when they started, how long they were or anything. We effectively had to ‘read’ them like a human would read them – we started by looking for stuff that looked like a table of contents to see if there were page numbers there to help. Sadly the pdf page numbers were not the same as the printed page numbers and so then we had to look for other signifiers, like pages with lots of empty space at the top which looked like new chapters. We had to try lots of different ways to find clues as to where the chapters were so that we could chop them up, which was an interesting process. Pdfs aren’t structured in a useful way, so we had to get creative.
Other than that, I’ve been involved in both the Emerald and De Gruyter partnerships. The great thing about those is that you know you are part of building the most important piece of technology those companies own. It can be scary because of that, but it’s good to also know you’re having a real impact. It helps that both of those projects went well – we won the Open Athens Best Publisher UX award on both of them.
How has the company changed since you first got here?
When I started there were about ten people in the company, and I was the last person to be interviewed by everybody who was working in Oxford (there was already one remote developer and another colleague based in Somerset). Up until that point, it was small enough that you could just get everybody in the room to talk to a new recruit. We’ve grown to around 40 employees now, so there are more specialised roles and the projects have become much bigger. When I started we would mostly be writing small systems to do some content enrichment or a specialised task, whereas now we’re building whole delivery platforms and getting involved with digital transformation.
How has the technology you’re working with changed?
A lot of it is quite similar but I would say that the main difference is cloud computing and having continuous deployment pipelines. When I started stuff would be deployed to servers and these would be actual servers that someone had to turn on, and the way we deployed things was fairly ad hoc – you build a new version and then someone else has to manually deploy things. Now, with cloud computing, you can spin stuff up automatically, and with continuous deployment you can set up a pipeline where once someone checks in some code you can run some checks and then automatically push it to a test environment so others can look at it. When you want to move through the different stages someone just presses a button, so you can move things through to live in a nice automatic fashion. It lets you get stuff out quickly to real users while still having the confidence that someone else has tested it and so you can be fairly sure it will work well in real life. On De Gruyter for example we push out new changes pretty much every week, which is really hard to do without automation. Plus, if there are problems we can get fixes out in around an hour or so which is great. Of course, some companies have been working like this for a while, but the big difference is now it’s available to more than just the tech giants.
What do you think is the most important skill or attribute needed for working at 67 Bricks?
I think in general for working in tech it’s important to be able to admit you don’t know things. The point of working in a team is that everyone’s skills complement each other and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you’re more concerned about hiding your ignorance then no one else can come in and fill the gap for you. I’ve worked with a few people who have seen admitting ignorance as a sign of weakness, and that makes things really difficult. It’s also important when you’re in a senior position to model this behaviour – no matter how far you get you can’t know everything, the field is so huge. So put it out there when you don’t know!
What would you say to anyone considering applying for a job with us?
Obviously, I’ve been here for nine years which is a bit of a vote of confidence! The work is varied and truly full-stack. In a lot of places you can be siloed into front end, databases, infrastructure, customer insight etc… While you can’t be an expert in all of those things, at 67 Bricks you are encouraged to get involved with them all.
One of the things I like is that I could be fiddling with a webpage to make something look a certain way, and then also thinking about some business logic in the back-end and the databases, and then also thinking about the problems we’re trying to solve and what the customers need. Doing all that in a single day is great! You can also switch up your day – you could have spent all morning talking to people and then want to bury your head in some code for a bit – you can swap between different types of work to refresh yourself.
Finally, the focus here on doing things the right way and solving the right problems is really good – there are a number of companies who just want to get a spec out of a customer and if the customer wants to change their mind they can be hit with additional costs, whereas from the outset we’re focused on what they are really trying to achieve. It’s so much nicer to be building the right things in the right way.
Crystal ball moment – what do you think we’ll be working on in 15 years’ time?
The sort of problems we’ll be solving will likely be similar – finding ways to enrich, organise, and process content and get it in front of the right people. The tools we use to do that of course may be more sophisticated. There’s lots of talk about AI replacing everyone’s jobs, but I think those sorts of things are best for when the person asking the question knows what they want. For example, you can now get AIs where you can ask in natural language for a picture and it will produce that picture, say you ask for a picture of a dog in a top hat, that’s what you’ll get, but that only works if you know what you want. A lot of our work is talking with people who don’t know what they want, so I think we’re safe from AI for a few more years!
