In 2022, the company revenue exceeded 4 million euros and cleverti’s CEO, Carlos Coutinho Silva, expects to hit the mark of 5 million euros during 2023, making it a grow of 25%.

Developing its business since 2010, Nearshore was always a strategy. “I truly believe we were one of the first companies in Portugal to work in nearshore”, says cleverti’s CEO in TSF‘s radio program “Negócios e Empresas”.

“We’ve been growing steadily over the years, and with part of that growth comes the will to hire more people”. Boasting a robust team of professionals, cleverti strives to expand its workforce to 150 individuals by the end of 2025. This remarkable growth is fueled by exceptional outcomes, client satisfaction and the ability to attract exceptional talent.

Currently with more than 80 professionals, cleverti is agnostic on the technologies that seeks.  Outsystems, Java, Angular, React and Phyton are a few of the technologies wanted to integrate the several open projects.

Working with PME’s and start-ups in over 15 countries, and facing the difficulty of attracting good professionals at a cost that cleverti can fit into their projects, one of the solutions is to extend the recruiting to Brazil and, later on, to the US and Canadian markets.

Cleverti’s latest interview to discuss the great 2022 results and expected growth can be heard in  today’s (May 17th) TSF program here.

The post Cleverti plans Nearshore expansion, with recruitment in Brazil appeared first on Cleverti.

Ahmed (QA Engineer): Hello! you’re very welcome! I think it was mostly my passion for technology together with my love to work remotely. As for the career itself, it was something I developed over the years, slowly growing on me and today, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.

Cleverti showed up in my life as a surprise through Viviane! She contacted me on Linkedin, we had a pleasant conversation, and here we are today.

Q: As an expert in this area, what are your predictions for AI and Machine Learning in software testing? Can we predict that these will become the standard in software testing?

Ahmed: Definitely! AI testing tools can help perform tests with AI-powered visual verifications, which, in turn, give out a range of various outcomes.

Organizations are already using AI for image-based testing, AI spidering, monitoring API testing, and automated testing tasks. AI can help you overcome challenges and accelerate the testing process without human intervention.

It can predict client behaviour, detect fraudulence that is not captured with traditional functional tests, and assist in targeted marketing by replicating manual activities.

It eliminates test coverage overlaps, optimizes test automation, and improves agility and predictability through self-learning.

The QA teams can leverage AI testing tools to improve normal testing efforts with expedited time and greater accuracy!

Q: When it comes to cybersecurity, do you feel that Security As A Service will find a place in the market?

Ahmed: It already has found its place. For a bit of context, it allows companies to use an external provider to handle and manage cybersecurity.

It is now becoming the preferred security model for small and medium-sized businesses. SECaaS (Security as a Service) reduces upfront costs of security hardware, outsources and simplifies security management plus removes the need to employ highly trained (and expensive) security staff.

Furthermore, it avoids capital outlay and instead uses either a subscription or Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) model to reduce the total cost of ownership for your security platform.

In addition, it greatly reduces the amount of time your staff has to spend securing your network and maintaining security updates.

I believe it’s a great solution for those who need highly skilled network security experts, as they are costly. SECaaS grants you access to these experts without having them on your payroll.

The post A passionate QA Engineer – Ahmed Mazloum (Q&A) appeared first on Cleverti.

Q: Exploring your website, I could see you call yourself a web developer but a digital content creator as well, as you have worked on different communication agencies.

Some months ago, we asked Luis Mirandela – how front-end developers and designers are supposed to coexist – and guess what? Here you are, someone who has worked as a front-end developer and graphic designer.

Do you think there is still a conflict between these two roles* (front-end developer and graphic designer), or does the toolset available (Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch) nowadays have the power to bring everyone together for the same goal?

*The memes trolling this relation are massive and hilarious, by the way.

A: There is no conflict at all… I think that the perfect scenario is having a designer that knows and understands HTML and CSS, UI/UX and a developer that know how to create a mock-up and understands the basics of design, for example, colours, typography and has a good visual culture. It’s pretty much like frontend and backend developers, its always good to understand at least, a little bit what each role does, so we can be a better professional and evolve at the same time. This happened to me, because like you said I started. So, this being said, I really believe that these two roles can coexist and should, if we meet this criteria.

No doubt that tools like Adobe XD, Figma and Sketch or even Invision, help get the designers and developers together, and I think is the best methodology for both to have an understanding of each role processes.

Q: Can a past experience as a graphic designer help in a frontend developer role ?

A: From my experience, all I can say is that I have started on graphic design and did the natural evolution to web development and I can see major differences in the work I do daily as  frontend development, that I would notice if I hadn´t done any design work previously.

For me, graphic design serves the purpose of solving a problem with attractive visual elements. I believe that problem-solving design thinking can and should help deal with some of these issues. Of course, I was only trying to layout something beautiful the first time I opened Photoshop/Illustrator.

There’s no doubt that I’m aware of the power and importance of great design. But most of the time, designers are only allowed to deal with the client’s problem, instead of handling real problems. Designers spend most of the time guessing what the client really wants with no data to help on that.

Being a developer with design skills allowed you to have way more control and over each case and client, because you have more data to work with and concrete goals to achieve. Besides, working on web development or applications allows you to efficiently propagate information.

Q: Before this interview, I came across some awesome CSS animations, and I thought you might be interested in this theme, as well.

It is fascinating the multiple ways web designers have to capture users’ attention. What are your favorite techniques or cool-looking animations?

A: In my opinion, one of the most important aspects to capture users attention is to apply an effective use of the white space. Since I came from a design background, I think this is really important because it will create a sense of balance within the web application. Balance is key. White space is can create a visual hierarchy, telling the users where to look at.

But, there are others, like hover effects, we can create cool hover effects just by using CSS or some advanced effects with a little help from JavaScript, scroll effects and loading animations. The loading one is also very important, it has the power of keeping the client in your website, or not. Perception of the speed of the website is based on load time and smoothness of animations. What matters the most to users is that your website feels fast. If it feels fast, the users will remain there and they will come back for sure, if not, well they leave and they won’t come back probably.

Q: How would you describe your style of animation? Would you consider yourself minimalist, or do you love creative visuals?

A: I guess it depends on the project itself. Some projects require a minimalist approach, while on others we have the possibility to get more creative and bold. I tend to like the minimalist ones because they work well on any project and they help to achieve one of the goals we already talked about, and that is users attention. You can have a minimalist animation and be awesome and creative at the same time.

It´s all about the purpose or goal.

Q: Which trends would you mention as the top web development trends of the year? 

A: As top development trends for this year, I would like to mention Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Internet Of Things, AI Chatbots,   Yarn Package Manager. When it comes to frontend frameworks is ReactJS, Angular and VueJS. Regarding programming languages is Javascript, Typescript, Python and PHP. In the end I don´t really think that trends are that important, we should use a framework or a programming language if we need them for our project and not because it is a trend.

The post José Miguel Almeida – A front-end developer with graphic designing background (QA) appeared first on Cleverti.

A: First of all, let me thank you for this invitation. If you allow me to make a long story short, I would say as result of the covid-19 pandemic, the oppourtunity to work across borders has increased while remote has definitely become the preferred option for most software developers.

As the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining.

We started looking at the Brazilian market as a particularly interesting option, due to the quality of the professionals and the cultural proximity between our two countries. So far, it has been a successful venture, and we already have several people working in Brazil for exciting projects throughout Europe.

Regarding your question, I would say the main concerns are related to working as a contractor. Even preferring to work remotely, dealing with the commitments you need to take as a contractor can be harder to take in.

Some people get concerned about losing certain perks typically indexed with employment contracts; others are mostly concerned with the contract’s duration.

We can get around this issues by offering an attractive compensation; a career plan; premium acess to training platforms (Udemy and Pluralsight); Follow-up and feedback programs; and a nice benefits package for those who come to be part of our team as a contractors.

Cleverti’s approach is based on long-term relationships, and this is something I always like to emphasize with candidates. Fortunately, we also have people who have been through the same decision-making process and can assist candidates throughout this first step.

Q: Ana Raposo (HR Manager at Cleverti), in an interview with the Cleverti Blog, said that “The so-called emotional salary should include initiatives for the well-being of employees, work-life balance mechanisms and opportunities for competence and career development. ” Do we also extend this effort to those who work with us from Brazil? If so, how?

A: Undoubtely, the so-called emotional salary makes a difference, and that’s why, at Cleverti, we seek to balance peoples’ benifts regardless of their location. This is an ongoing work that implies understanding what is most valued in each location, and accomodating the best possibilities in our offer. We believe, briefly, we’re going to have news about this subject. My suggestion for the IT professionals in Brazil would be: Stay tuned! 😉

Q: I am wondering what opportunities there are currently available to Brazilian developers and which ones you consider most attractive?

A: At this moment, we have open positions for FullStack(Java+ React).

Data Engineer; Senior DevOps Engineer , Python Backend Engineer, QA and QA Automation; Python Backend Engineer; FullStack(Java+ React).

These opportunities are available for European countries like United Kingdom and Belgium, in industries as smart mobility, cloud-based consumer review, and web-based geographic information systems.

The post How to work in IT from Brazil for a European company (Q&A) appeared first on Cleverti.

Q: Ana, thanks for accepting this interview. Let me start by asking how did you become interested in HR in the first place?

A: Thank you for the invitation! In fact, it was quite a natural step for me. I have always been very keen on communication in its various facets. On the other hand, I also enjoy relating directly to people and understanding where they want to go, what drives them to get there and what are their “pains” along the way.

For some time, I materialized this fondness by working in Marketing, where I gained experience in planning, executing and analysing actions in different channels, aiming to create the best experience for our audience, while consolidating corporate brand and identity in the market.

The transformation of work paradigms, most notably in IT, led to an evolution in the way people ought to be managed, reforming some outdated views on the role of HR in business. Rather than an activity dedicated to administering people and processes, HR now holds a more strategic role. Today, HR is focused on managing and leading employee’s energies to build high performing teams that accomplish organizations’ goals and nurturing employees to turn them into brand ambassadors.

HR became a key piece for business success, responsible for attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent to ensure that companies keep competitive. Deep down, the role of HR is increasingly closer to Marketing and implies an integrated communication, involving all organizational areas, in favour of a combined action to achieve common ends.

HR is, ultimately, the foundation of a company’s reputation among its internal audience, and this widely impacts on the outside. Any actions taken with our internal audience echo on our external audience and influence our company’s overall reputation.

Q: With Covid-19 causing shifts in the way organizations streamline their talent management processes, what do you consider the biggest challenge for HR in IT Industry nowadays?

A: The IT Industry is experiencing a phase of great pressure, not only in Portugal, but worldwide. The pandemic has made the need for digital transformation of processes and businesses more evident, leading to an increased demand for software solutions that allow organizations to keep a competitive edge. Likewise, during the pandemic, remote work which was far from being a novelty in the IT industry became widespread even in more traditional business areas on a global scale.

“The so-called emotional salary should include initiatives for the well-being of employees, work-life balance mechanisms and opportunities for competency and career development.”

The post-pandemic age we are entering poses some paradoxical challenges to tech companies. Here is the first one. On the one hand, the huge demand for digital solutions obviously benefits the business of those who develop them. On the other hand, this leads to an inordinate search for skilled professionals who are increasingly difficult to find. Attracting, motivating and retaining talent is HR’s biggest challenge by far.

In many locations, Portugal included, we are facing a scenario very close to full employment. This leaves us with a scarce and (very!) demanding audience. Thus, companies are necessarily required to offer a comprehensive employment package that goes beyond salary. The so-called emotional salary should include initiatives for the well-being of employees, work-life balance mechanisms and opportunities for competency and career development. Companies must be more and more creative in this regard. Still, let’s face it; money isn’t everything, but it’s highly valued though! The fierce struggle to attract the best talent may lead some companies to increase salaries unreasonably and cause strong imbalances that can jeopardize business endurance.

As a result of the pandemic, we saw unprecedented home office growth

And this is where the second paradox comes in. For companies like Cleverti, this was a positive outcome because it allowed them to ensure business continuity, with no major effort and without any loss of productivity. So, in theory, having people voluntarily working from home can allow companies to keep employees motivated due to time savings, schedule management and better quality of life, hire elsewhere and even reduce some costs.

But this novel reality also brings challenges to people management and leadership. Effective remote workers management entails a mindset shift and ability to change the way we lead people and teams. Here are a few examples.

While autonomy and responsibility must be encouraged, people cannot simply be left to their own devices or physical distance may lead to stress, frustration and detachment. People follow up should be recurrent and effective as we spend less in-person time with other colleagues and supervisors.

“To bring employees together around a constructive culture, companies should, first and foremost, have acceptable values, which they share and by which they live.”

More than working time, outcome, backed up by deadline meeting and work quality, should be the measure of productivity. This requires a proper definition and sharing of standards and goals.

Communication and interaction are vital in remote team management. Relevant information across the organization should be shared clearly and regularly in multiple channels to prevent flaws, bottlenecks and misinformation. Social interaction between different people and teams should be encouraged. Also, video interaction should prevail over non-visual contact.

All of these require organizations to make the right tools available to enable interaction, face-to-face time, instant communication, feedback, collaboration and information sharing and hosting.

Q: What would you say are the critical factors to build and maintain a company culture?

A: As remote or hybrid work prevails, upholding a company culture can be a huge challenge if we don’t want to become clusters of many single entities.

Ideally, company culture should stimulate employees to give their best, contribute to common goals, be productive, experience a sense of fulfilment and be happy in their jobs. Companies with engaged employees are more likely to perform better, embrace innovation and succeed in their business.

Building and sustaining a collective identity and sense of belonging is not something you can do by decree. It relies on multiple factors, such as suited talent selection, effective onboarding, conveying a common purpose, having well-defined practices, standards and goals available to all, involving people in suggestion and decision-making, showing concern for employee welfare, ensuring two-sided trust, nurturing interaction and communication.

If this is not easy to achieve with everyone in the same space, it gets worse with physical distance. In a virtual or hybrid scenario employees should still feel engaged and sheltered. They must be able to realize that they are not working alone but as a whole, their opinions matter, their efforts are recognized and rewarded. They should also feel that the company is concerned with them and counts on their stamina to do a good job.

To bring employees together around a constructive culture, companies should, first and foremost, have acceptable values, which they share and by which they live. They should count on a nearby and reliable leadership, ensure regular employee contact with their supervisors and peers, foster agile communication and collaboration, indorse consistent feedback and recognition, establish mechanisms to measure and safeguard employee well-being, drive initiatives and events that bring together people from different teams and areas (whenever possible, in-person).

Q: Before we wrap up, can you tell us what do you expect for Cleverti in the next few years?

A: In recent years, Cleverti has been expanding significantly, both in business and in number of people. After a turnover growth around 100% in 2019, we have maintained this trend and ended 2020 with higher revenue, staff, projects and clients.

As many companies like us, not only in Portugal but worldwide, attracting and retaining suited talent may be the biggest challenge ahead. Currently, we have near 50 open job opportunities to face the projects we have in hand. And, considering the huge global demand for qualified IT professionals, this number is likely to increase. 

We deal with highly demanded and demanding professionals. Hence, the big issue is to make Cleverti more attractive than competitors when they make their choices to join or leave our company. We must always keep this in mind in order to improve our employee value proposition. To have highly performing and driven people, we seek to balance the rewards and benefits they get in return.  

“We are reinforcing our presence with a growing number of projects in key markets, namely Germany, the United Kingdom and also Portugal.”

This is an ongoing work, which presupposes following market trends, having an agile people operations team, listening to our people, and being able to adapt. It also involves many variables ranging from offering stimulating technology challenges, attractive remuneration packages, comprehensive benefits, inclusion and diversity policies, development opportunities, career progression, strong leadership, co-worker quality, consistent feedback, merit-based assessment and recognition, work from anywhere approach, work-life balance; up to bringing people together under a common purpose, fostering business stability and safeguarding company reputation. 

With the widespread of remote work, we have managed to expand our team from several locations, both in Portugal and abroad. Keeping all these people connected to each other and engaged with Cleverti is also a concern.  

Deep down, these are healthy concerns as, in 2021 and onwards, the upward scenario is expected to linger. We estimate to increase turnover around 30% and human dimension around 35% this year. We are reinforcing our presence with a growing number of projects in key markets, namely Germany, the United Kingdom and also Portugal. As the pandemic stabilizes, we will resume prospecting other relevant markets, such as the US, Canada and Austria. We will also always keep following the latest technological trends to provide our people with top skills and offer new possibilities to our clients’ businesses. 

The post Cleverti’s HR Manager on the biggest challenges of people management in IT (Q&A) appeared first on Cleverti.

Q: Rúben, thanks for accepting this interview. I would like to start by asking what, in your opinion, are the top Python trends for 2021 and why.

A: The main trends for the language haven’t changed much since I started working as a Python developer five years ago: Python is mostly used as a data science language, a scripting language, and as a web development language. Python is the most popular language for these three uses and understandably so.

Obviously, I can’t be neutral about it, but the Python language is fantastically designed and its third-party libraries, like the web development frameworks Django and Flask make everything simple to do and easy to read while still retaining a lot of flexibility. This caters to both experienced software engineers and developers who are learning their first language, and that explains the constant rise in popularity Python has been experiencing.

And, to really answer your question, with this rising popularity, new uses also arise. One of these new uses is game development: World of Tanks is developed with C++ and Python, and mods for The Sims 4 are also written in Python. Other uses that have become much more relevant in recent years are cloud computing, especially in the IoT (Internet of Things) area, and being the first-choice language for any academic courses involving any sort of programming.

Q: Since the beginning of your current project at Cleverti, it has been two years with ups and downs for sure. Can you enumerate some of the skills needed to be successful as a Python developer?

A: The most important skill is being able to work as a team. This should apply to any developer, or even almost every job. Being an expert in the core language, staying up to date with the latest improvements in Python, improving logical thinking, and having a search engine as a very trusty partner in development are all very important, but they don’t matter that much if you don’t fit in a team.

And fitting in a team involves being able to communicate with them, being available to help with any questions even if it slows you down, writing your code with everyone else in mind, which means documenting, reviewing each other’s code, pair programming from time to time, and probably many other important tasks and skills that I can’t think of right now!

Developing those skills should help having more ups than downs in a software developer’s career. At least I like to think mine has had more ups than downs!

Q: It is frequent to come across articles that criticize Artificial Intelligence for having ethical and moral dilemmas. In your opinion, will these issues affect the development of these technologies, or is this whole debate part of the process, and AI and ML are inevitable in the coming years?

A: I think that evolution of AI and ML is inevitable and that its consequences are also inevitable. We would be missing out on too much by not going through with this evolution, and attempting to stop or slow this evolution politically in some countries will make others gain a competitive advantage. Though, in most cases, I believe that debates on ethical and moral dilemmas are blown out of proportion.

When we think of this subject, we often think about cars being more and more autonomous with time. We now have autonomous emergency brakes, lane-keeping assist, adaptive cruise control, auto-SOS calls on accident, blind-spot detection, and others in many conventional cars. These features make driving much safer and more convenient, and the only drawback I can see is the additional cost of a car that contains all of these.

Then, we jump into fully autonomous vehicles, where the drawbacks could be more severe. It is likely that you’ve seen at least one article where a self-driving car caused some fatal crash, hence the moral dilemmas you mentioned. In my opinion, this happens because people trust these self-driving technologies too much and forget that they’re still responsible for driving and ensuring everyone’s safety.

While the constant evolution of AI and ML is amazing, we cannot expect technology to make the best decision for all scenarios. Even with autopilot in airplanes, which is a much older invention, errors also happen. These moral dilemmas can be avoided, if we adjust our expectations and keep paying attention to any mistakes, because, for the time being, we’re the ones who are really in control.

The post What’s next for Python, AI and ML in 2021? appeared first on Cleverti.

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Over the last few blog articles,  many things were written about communication, knowledge sharing, and current trends. This time, we pretend to know how front-developers and designers are supposed to coexist. Do the mechanisms of developers clash with the vision of designers? It was what we discussed with Luis Mirandela, a front – end developer with more than 10 years of experience.

Q: Luis, you’ve been  working  in front-end  development for more than 10 years, and  many  things  have changed since that, including the  way  we  moved  from the archaic process of  producing  static  designs  in Photoshop to embracing  a much more expansive toolset. Is  it fair to  say  the modern Web  design  process  requires  intense collaboration between  designers  and  front-end  developers, or in your opinion, companies can  succeed  in  having separate departments for web design and front-end development?

A: Nowadays having separate departments should not affect the end product. Obviously, communication is key on the course of all the projects but current technologies and methodologies make it possible to share designs and their interactions with the end-user in a way that it’s very clear what the result should be, examples of that are Adobe XD, Figma and Sketch. Also, one thing to notice is that now UX is being taken very seriously and that brings to the table very clear guidelines leaving front-end developers and web-designers be usually in sync.

Q: You’ve mentioned a broad array of tools, however, a question that emerges is how to choose those tools? Should a developer choose a technology that fits his taste or should he opt for a specific technology based on the project?

A: This question usually causes a lot of discussion. As a personal opinion, each framework has its own pros and cons, so I normally choose depending on project requirements, when I’m working on a small solo project or up to a team of 2 maximum, React is my way to go. The minimal amount of boilerplate needed and getting results from the get-go is a huge plus. If I’m rather working on a large-scale app with a bigger team, I’d normally (if the decision of the tech is on the dev team side) go with Angular, the opinionated design makes it that team changes would not affect productivity in a mid to long term and also makes it easier to clean, refactor and maintain the code which is a nice thing when you have a large project.

Q: Finally, there is another world we haven’t explored…the back-end. After all this composition of design and front-end, how does the articulation with back-end work? I mean, does a front-end developer usually work with what the back-end provides, or is there any kind of communication to reach a middle ground?

A: There is a lot of communication, obviously documentation helps mitigate this a bit, but there are always many other things to discuss. For example, the back-end provides an endpoint for a certain feature but the way the app was designed requires another type of request, getting this information in two steps, or another data structure as normally front-end should have the minimum amount of business logic as possible. Those two sides of the coin can also improve a lot of an app by profiling bottlenecks and find new ways to improve communication and data handling, making the app quicker and safer.

For more content on technology, programming, and business development follow our YouTube Channel where we provide Talks and Podcasts on these topics.

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