Interview with Brian Hogg on Vehikl satellite office

Check out the interview below with Brian Hogg (@brianhogg) about the opening of the Vehikl satellite office in Hamilton. Brian is also co-organizing the new HamOnt JavaScript monthly meetup, the next one is taking place on April 25th with a talk on APIs by Attila Komaromi!

What’s Vehikl about?

We’re a software consultancy specialising in PHP and JavaScript. We build web applications written with popular frameworks such as Laravel, Express, NestJs, Vue, and React. We work with a number of startups and tech companies, and are like an extension of their team. We help set the technical direction along with working through their backlog of goals they want for their product.

One thing that sets Vehikl apart from anywhere else I’ve worked is the focus on pairing and mobbing daily. It’s one of the best ways I’ve seen for us to learn from each other, move projects forward in the best direction, avoid the context switching of having to review and merge code you haven’t seen before, and build trust as a team.

Why did Vehikl decide to open up a satellite office in Hamilton?

I’d been chatting with them about the growing tech scene in Hamilton even before I started with them back in late 2017, and how a Hamilton office (in addition to the main Waterloo office and their growing London office) could be a good move. There’s a lot of talented people in Hamilton who need to commute out of the city for work, along with all the students at McMaster, Mohawk and elsewhere who would love the opportunity to work locally.

When some prime space at CoMotion on King came available in December 2018 we made the decision to go for it 🙂

What do you expect for the office in the next few years?

Over the last couple years, the London office has grown to a team of about 10. They’ve just moved to some beautiful office space and are looking to at least double in size over the next year or two. The goal is to do the same in Hamilton. I’m excited to be heading it up!

What type of developer are you looking to hire as part of growing Vehikl’s office?

While we’ve got a backlog of projects and are looking to grow as quickly as possible, we’re also not in a rush. Initially we’re looking for more senior developers who will then be able to support giving opportunities to more junior developers and co-op students in the future. Comfort in speaking directly with clients, or the willingness to develop that skill, is a huge asset.

Any tips for developers to stand out in terms of resumes and portfolios?  What’s the most important thing that you always like to see from an applicant?

Certainly some indication that you’ve looked into what Vehikl is all about and that you specifically want to work here, rather than just the first employer that gives you an offer. We also don’t necessarily need experience in all the different technologies we work with since not every project uses them all, but specifically mentioning any experience you do have in them or other technologies that show you can pick it up relatively quickly is helpful.

I’m personally not concerned with seeing a big Github repo or similar right from the start. We do have a technical challenge you can do as part of the interview process, or allow a submission of a code sample that you’re proud of, after we’ve had an initial chat.

Have there been any particular challenges to opening a satellite office?

Once we decided to do it, CoMotion made it easy! The London office also started out of a coworking space, so it’s great that there was space and opportunity to do the same thing in Hamilton.

Since we’re brand new to the city the main challenge is spreading the word, and showing the vision of where we’re headed. Having people come out to the London or the larger Waterloo office to “see the future” of what we want Hamilton to be is always helpful – and I would love to get everyone at Vehikl together (almost 40 of us now!) to enjoy the CoMotion rooftop patio and invite folks in the tech community once the weather warms up.

Hamilton seems well positioned for tech satellite offices given soaring rent in the GTA.  What could Hamilton do to encourage more companies to open up satellite offices?

Having more inventory of unique and creative office space in the downtown core and elsewhere might be helpful, along with space that’s suited for smaller (5-10) person satellite offices to move into.

Before settling on CoMotion I took a look at some office space with a realtor and there were very few options for a company just starting out, and the ones that were available weren’t in the greatest shape. Very thankful spaces like CoMotion exist to fill that need!

Great to see you’re using Vue, I’m a fan!  Do you see Vue growth continuing? Can you see it displacing Angular and React in terms of job opportunities?

Hard to predict the future of tech 🙂 I’m also a big fan! I hadn’t worked with it before using it in a couple projects with Vehikl, and coming from using Backbone.js in WordPress projects it was a nice breath of fresh air.

While we sometimes use React, React Native and occasionally other frameworks in projects, we’re a major Patreon sponsor of Vue to help continue its growth and we will be taking most of the team down for VueConf US 2019 in Tampa next week. It’s currently the preferred framework for any of our new projects.