After months of silence I decided to finally put my pen to paper. My head was loaded with thoughts. Why? Perhaps due to the sour awakening after the big Christmas feast or to the happy hours of New Year’s Eve, but mostly because the things that happened behind the big curtains during the last days of 2019. I began to wonder: How was 2019 treating me, our company BlockBen and what may the big 2020 bring for us?

Rollercoaster ride vs. Control

If I want to be honest, it’s quite difficult to find the right words or separate the two questions. My personal experience is that the previous year was literally a wild rollercoaster ride. So far, during my career I always had to stick with strict, internally created rules and our own internal teams. As every coin, it had two sides, a negative and a positive. What I may want to highlight is that on one side there was massive control over the source code quality of the systems, resulting in the trustworthy operation of the programs. On the other side, several new innovations couldn’t be added to the programs due to these same rigid regulations and processes. As the number of IT employees is continuously increasing and soon it will consist 50% of the total employee number here at BlockBen, the construction of appropriate operations became a necessity.

No Holy Grail, but the path is right

Let me tell you that it’s a great challenge to introduce processes that lead to (not-always-appreciated) enterprise-level of control, but at the same time does not kill the creative vibe of developers and designers. We haven’t conquered this challenge yet, therefore I cannot provide you any Holy Grail, but I feel in my guts we stepped onto the right path.

Throughout the year, I had to live up to massive expectations and I faced many challenges. I’ve already led a team of 20 people before and I took part in great projects with 200 contributors. But this time is clearly and definitely different. This time we are the ones who create the frame for the future operation of BlockBen’s IT department.

Viktor’s previous article tells a lot about the last year of BlockBen, but as always, I approach this question from the IT side. This field is always a bit different. Here, we do not work in parallel on the same task. Here, rule number one is not letting the ball fall to the ground. There shall be no unfinished work, or at least we must be aware of the risks of not completing it. Forgetting something will never be an option.

This leads us back to the previous paragraph. We are doing our best to work on it. I would like to thank every team that participated and still participates in developments for their significant contribution: campaigns, UX, graphics, web pages, front end, back end, mobile, blockchain, DevOps, IT security and operation. Oh God, it’s hard to even list them all!

BlockBenPay: a new world

I would like to separately highlight the UX field. This field is dedicated to our users and the goal is to design our application and software to be “ergonomic”, in other words creating them easy to use. I feel the importance of mentioning this, as we’ve put a great effort into the future application of BlockBenPay service for a “little” while. I am happy to say that the next big version of our current application is being made according to the “big book” of software development. After the first step (collecting and structuring business needs) UX design was the next thing to do. But being the kind man I am, I let Bence Bohati (MSKTRS) write about his experiences later.

What is for sure, is that after many frustrations, our UI (graphics and design) and UX (user experience) professionals set the bar pretty high and created a real BlockBen product. Now, “we only have to develop it”. I must confess we will be sweating during the development, so we end up having the application we dreamt of and what satisfies the needs of our customers.

I do believe BlockBenPay is the future. Our next mobile application. An application that is not only going to be necessary for the QR code-based payment solution, but more importantly opens the door to bank account management, conscious financial planning and brings a password-free world to us.