Our Blog

The last few months here at Viva IT have seen some incredible challenges conquered and projects delivered. We feel that it is time to broaden our skill-set and increase our capacity by opening up some new roles.

I’ve been with Viva IT for just over a month now, almost straight out of university. Based at Dock in Leicester, the office has huge windows and is surrounded by trees, a nice change from the windowless office I worked in at my previous job.

Like most companies, we travel in and out of work, each day. We would come into work a little later usually, in order to avoid the traffic, and work later too. It worked well, but with the early morning sun poking through the curtains in the morning, we were more eager to come into work earlier.

When we found the Symfony2 framework back in 2013, we could see the power and potential it could have to the PHP community.

Moving into Dock in late 2013 was our way of celebrating a very successful partnership between infrastructure and software development, as we acquired a Leicester-based start-up that specialised in web applications and software development.

Last weekend was the International Space Apps Challenge, which saw cities from all over the world gather for a two-day, space-themed hackathon. As we are quite-literally next door to the National Space Centre, we thought that we should give it a go.

Admittedly, we were a little bit nervous to hold our first lecture, but what better subject than a mini-round-up of the PHP frameworks that we have used, including a quick introduction as to why we love Symfony?

On the 1st and 2nd of March, we attended the Leicester Civic Hack weekend, our good friends at Dock provided the location and excellent catering for the event. We went along primed to get stuck in, eager to use our development techniques, expertise and technology to inspire and ultimately produce something functional.

It's not all work here at the Viva IT offices. We're strong believers in being part of the community, so we took a break from our busy schedule of SCRUMing, developing, and testing to go to the monthly Symfony London meet-up.

Thanks to the huge success of our software, we’ve outgrown our small office at the Innovation Centre. In order to accommodate the growth of our company, we’ve moved to Leicester’s brand-new 5.9 million-pound technology hub, Dock.