It’s Sabrage Time: A Recap of 2022

2022, you’ve been a wild ride, and we made it out alive! Historical figures like Gorbachov and Queen Elizabeth are gone, Russia unleashed the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II by invading Ukraine, Musk finally got his hands on Twitter, world population reached 8 billion, just like the price of bread in your local bakery due to inflation.

Despite all these things, we had some memorable moments at Infinum in 2022.

Oh, and before we dive into those, pop a bottle of bubbly in the cooler. You will need it by the time you’re finished reading this article.

In the beginning of the year, our investment arm Infinum Ventures invested in Rentlio, a travel-tech SaaS company that provides a reservation management system for the hospitality industry. 

Spring being a time of renewal and all, in came the Infinum re-brand marketing that has been plotting for quite some time. After 17 years, our looks got sharper, our logo bolder and our website slicker. Check out the new Philips MasterConnect case, and you’ll see what we mean.

March brought along a big change as Nixa became the new CEO while Car moved to the chairman role. Don’t worry, you can still hear Pariške Kapije blasting from Nixa’s office, the exception proving the rule.

With the company growing immensely, a management re-organization followed as management expanded to 10 people. We’ve also introduced the role of a Team Director, while the engineering department went over some structural changes as well. Later on in the year, Will joined us as Head of Design. On top of that, three new teams were formed: SecOps, Office&Ops, and Product Strategy.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Led by the Team Director Chris Bradshaw, our Strategy team has been saving clients time and money by telling them exactly that. The team played an instrumental role in the success of our client Mara’s digital product, a crypto-wallet enabling easy money transfer in the African market.

With Spring, Academy blossomed. In 2022, it expanded to four countries, adding four new courses in Flutter, .NET, WordPress, and Devops. By the end of the year, students had graduation ceremonies in Spring, Summer, and Fall. We’re talking 1,862 applications, 201 enrolled students, 120 graduates, and 28 hired students. Sheeeesh!

In May, we kicked off Infinum Talks in Skopje. Open to the public, free and gathering like-minded people to meet, learn and discuss software design and development.

The final tally? Eight Infinum Talks by QA, Android, iOS, Design, and Product Strategy teams in our offices. Since we drank all the beer, you can watch the lectures.

We opened a beautiful new office in Macedonia in May, even appearing on their national TV. Our Zagreb office saw major construction as the 11th floor got a whole new look with studio equipment, while Porsche Digital was deported from the 9th floor. Sorry guys, Feng Shui. Besides a shiny new office, another shiny award rolled in the form of a prestigious IF Design Award for our NutriU collaboration with Phillips, making it the fourth international award for this successful project.

The award that topped off the year was our Project Management Team Lead Lucija Zlatar winning the IPMA Project Management Award in the category of Best Project Manager! The competition was fierce, but Lucija won it for her work on the Chatbot Nikša project with A1.

Infinum Foundation, run voluntarily by Infinum employees, saw three major milestones: 

In 2022, we made 24 donations to organizations helping children, families, sports clubs; promoting education, art, and mental health; urban and rural; groups, and individuals. The icing on the cake came in the form of a nomination for the Volunteering Oscar, which we were very flattered by.

Even though we didn’t win the Volunteering Oscar, as 2022 reached its end, we’ve won the best employer award for the 5th time. The success is even greater at the level of the Infinum group – Productive is the best employer of all the small companies, and Porsche Digital Croatia won third place in the category of medium companies.

To help our people develop in the right direction, we also introduced the progression framework, career talk, and equipment budget.

And we sure did party. The year kicked off with the 11th Showoff. Each team had its own team building with plenty of stories to tell which will never be told… because reasons. With summer came the Infinum Fest, followed by a massive October team building in Crvena Luka. Check out the video if you haven’t yet! And then, just to be sure we had enough fun, we closed with the 12th Showoff – full circle.

This article is already longer than a spoiled child’s letter to Santa, and guess what – we haven’t even mentioned the fact we’ve hired 87 people, 15 babies were born to Infinum parents, two of our employees celebrated their 10-year milestones, while another 14 people celebrated 5 years at Infinum, our Chief Client Officer Josip Bišćan reinstated the germknödel tradition, the Macedonian team came second in a marathon race.

You know how you should pay back old debts before the year ends if you want to avoid bad luck? Well, a few years back, we gave a sabrage tutorial with Nixa as the main prize at an event we attended. What is sabrage, you ask? Sabrage is the opening of a bottle of champagne with a saber.

Nixa finally got around to passing this valuable knowledge down to the lucky winner who picked up a new skill with ease. And because at Infinum we love sharing knowledge, we decided to open-source this tutorial so you can impress your friends this New Year’s eve.

Happy holidays and a bubbly 2023. Aim for the stars, just not the living room TV. Cheers!