I started working at Vivup (vivupbenefits.co.uk). Actually I started there approximately one year ago, so in order to keep this blog bang up to date as ever… time to tell you about this!

Vivup helps organisations provide benefits to their employees. We have many large government clients such as NHS trusts, local councils, police forces etc, and increasingly bringing in private companies too. The benefits on offer are many and varied. One part of the website is like a shopping site with all kinds of products available as a “salary sacrifice” purchase, paid for over many months. There’s lots of bicycles available via cycle-to-work schemes, and there’s store discount cards, and all sorts of health & wellbeing offerings. If these benefits sound good, you’ll have to arrange to sign your whole company up to Vivup!

As you can imagine, it’s quite a big complicated website, and it’s a rails app! We have a tech team working on various aspects, including people focussed on the mobile apps, and the separate .NET bits. We also have people who are a lot more front-end focussed. They’re migrating more and more of the site to use React on GraphQL. Our sub-team’s focus is on the rails coding. There’s back-end aspects, the database and API integrations, plus a big back-office admin interface built with ActiveAdmin, and lots of interesting workflows and dataflows. To deliver improvements to all of this, we have quite a rapid pace of projects running in parallel, which is taking some getting used to. We also have a bunch of QA people, which is something I’m not used to. Quite a big tech team in total.

But the wider organisation feels big compared to previous jobs. I think in my previous big organisation jobs (e.g. 3mobile, B.P. & Alstom) I was in tech project teams isolated from the rest of the organisation, whereas at Vivup I’ve been involved in occasional bits of collaboration and communication across the organisation. Also it’s small enough that the whole organisation gets together on a quick video call each Friday, and for face-to-face social meet-ups three times per year. These are a lot of fun. I joined Vivup just in time to go along to the 2022 Christmas party in Newcastle, and we’ve just had the 2023 one in Liverpool.