Zypp & Tim: an impactful combination

A first year with a lot of variation and responsibility

My first year at Zypp was great, and in this blog I will share why. I will explain what makes working at Zypp my worth, including the challenges that come along by working at a start-up. Every job has its pros and cons, I will try to touch both. I must warn you, there are not many cons (otherwise why write this post at all, am I right?).

The main takeaway is that in this first year I got a lot of responsibility and had a lot of variation in my tasks (in all aspects) which in turn helped Zypp grow to a stable start-up. I am happy to share my story with you!

The start of something new

In December 2021 I started working at Zypp with mainly experience with data science. I was looking for a new challenge where I could grow my technological skills and an environment where I could contribute to helping people and the organization grow. After a year, I can conclude I have found this. At Zypp the focus is on analysing and integrating data and automating processes.

Therefore, I learned a significant number of new skills on topics as data engineering, cloud architecture and programming paradigms in my first months.

Making impact

At all our projects we try to make a difference by making the lives of people better. By implementing our scalable solutions, we see the organisations grow in numbers without any issue in the connected domain. We often do not realise it enough: how seamless our solutions run. Until they don’t of course, it is a question of when something breaks where custom software is implemented in combination with data connections of different suppliers.

It is all about how easy and resilient the solution is on restoring order as soon something goes south. We always focus on improving the process, tech stack and people together, to reach the best synergy. This closely relates to me because I believe that this trifecta is essential in achieving optimal results. As soon as one of these topics is lacking, the others will also not reach their full potential.

In my first year I worked for more than 10 different clients, worked on creating more than 5 different user-faced applications. The projects ranged from automating essential operational processes to analysing data for ad-hoc questions. The activities ranged from designing a complete infra structure to project management with direct client contact and a lot in between, with a big chunk of coding for both front-end and back-end. All these numbers show that I have quite some variations in my daily work. What makes me the happiest about the client projects is the compliments we get from our clients. They often say we make an actual difference, and they are happy with how we work.

Tech & innovation

Next to working on client projects we keep developing and maintaining our own website and software product Zypper. This gives me the opportunity to extend my knowledge on the following tools and frameworks: Python, Azure, Docker, Terraform, Flask, HTML, Javascript, Sentry and architectural design. It is a broad spectrum of knowledge that gives me and the team the flexibility and power to design and develop the best solution from start to end.

However, at Zypp we believe that all these are just tools, the impact at the client is what matters. Our philosophy is to prevent vendor-lock-in for the solutions we design, we try to develop each block independently of the others. In this way the programming language or framework can be replaced more easily. Innovation is an important corner stone of this view, because we want to know when a better tool comes along to solve our problems.

Consequently, we keep learning and developing our (tech) skills, which was something I was looking for.

At Zypp

The small team of a start-up offers a lot of freedom, however there is a ‘risk’, as Freud once said: “most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility”. And this quote relates to working at a start-up, since you indeed get a lot of responsibility. You need a natural sense of taking responsibility for your own actions but also the actions of the team.

And maybe not all responsibility is scary, but when it is, it starts by acknowledging the fear exists. After that, we talk about it and try to help each other, which creates personal growth. I really appreciate this reciprocity between taking responsibility, freedom and going out of my comfort zone, it makes you feel alive.

One of the cons of a start-up is that not all things are arranged. This is often because nobody thought about or needed them before, f.e. HR or processes related stuff. However, the cool thing is that the solution is often in your own hands, you can pick up the gauntlet and make sure it will get fixed. And exactly in that moment you decide the actual importance of the subject, is it worth my time?

On top of that I can contribute to developing our strategy and online content. With the whole team we work together to grow Zypp, help each other grow and make the brand ‘Zypp’ known to the world. We all have different (study) backgrounds which gives us a nice advantage on developing a balanced strategy. And with our nice mix of creative and contextual tech experts we created a recognisable brand the past year.

It gave the possibility to influence the road ahead and to also work on non-coding related tasks, increasing the variety even more.

Lastly, I really enjoyed working with our small team where everyone is interested in each other. We have a kind and open atmosphere in the team. Our lunches and drinks are filled with laughter and talks about our weekends, politics, sports and of course tech. The inspiring office environment in CiC (with their good coffee and nice snacks!) and our quality office equipment makes working in the Zypp-office a pleasant experience.

Thanks team Zypp for this awesome frist year, let’s keep empowering people in the future!

Wrapping up

I tried to give a glimpse of my first year at Zypp. It was pleasant and full of responsibility and variation as you could read. The year was not always a bowl full of cherries but most of the time it was topped with some whipped cream. I made impact at our clients, developed my skills and most importantly: I enjoyed doing it.

Kind regards,

Tim van der Heijden