It’s summer 2020 and that means it’s time for our second pilot run of the University of Manchester student software company. We learnt a lot from our first pilot run last summer, not least from the great feedback we got from our founder employees. But we have a whole new set of challenges this year: new clients (including our first paying clients), a bigger team and, thanks to COVID-19, we’re having to run everything from fully distributed teams.
Luckily, the tool set we’re using already allows for remote collaboration, and as researchers with national and international collaborators we’re already pretty used to running projects online. The last few months of the 2019/2020 academic year also saw most of our teaching being moved online at the last minute. So, we already have the basic tools we need. We just need to adapt them for software engineering teams.
So welcome back to our founder employees, Karam Agha and Albert Viilik, who are rejoining us for a second summer. And a big welcome to new employees Amish Shah, Andrei Aleksanian, Cosmin Serdean, Jang Belche, Leo Elmecker, Miranda Watkins, Natalia Gutanu and Phoebe Evason. Last but definitely not least, we’re really pleased to have Stewart Blakeway joining the academic team, to help us cope with our rapid expansion this year.
Check back on this blog to hear from some of them about how they get on.