Over a year has flown by since we last updated you with News From The North, when we shared the first fruits of our expansion into the UK’s northern market.

The lack of update hasn’t stemmed from a lack of activity – it’s been an incredibly busy time. So we thought we’d take a moment to update you on some of the clients we’ve had the pleasure of working with and some of the great things we’ve managed to do together.

A rich mix of clients and challenges

GoEuro is a Berlin-based online travel aggregator, whose goal is to simplify the process of booking multiple trains, buses and flights in one go, all across Europe. EE’s team was based in-house in Manchester, with regular client visits to Berlin. Together we’ve been working to simplify the architecture of GoEuro’s booking system, with the goal of making it easier to onboard new providers. Having introduced new ways of working and simplified the architecture, GoEuro has now migrated the rest of the providers and are adding new providers to the new architecture.

We’re also working with Co-op Funeralcare, the UK’s leading funeral directors. The team has already won multiple awards for its work (including the Best Large Enterprise Digital Project at the Digital Tech Leaders Awards 2017 and Highly Commended at the UK IT Awards). Working in unison with the Co-op Digital Team, the EE team has managed to build an end-to-end digital service that is currently undergoing a national rollout. This service aims to give time back to the many hard-working and dedicated colleagues that work in the Co-op Funeralcare business.

An eCommerce content service company also numbers among our clients in the North; it has a product allowing customers to create high-performance shopping experiences. This work is based in our own offices in Manchester, where our team of Associates is working with the client to improve the scalability of its platform to meet growing demand.

Finally, our newest engagement in the North is with Hermes, the global courier and logistics company (which has its UK headquarters in Leeds). Based onsite at Hermes, the EE team is helping to build a long term strategy for creating and maintaining APIs; these will support a new web and mobile app refresh. The work is also supporting existing dev teams to improve ways of working and adopt proven development practices.

Our new home

With all this activity, we also needed to reassess our workspace. To that end, we’ve recently moved into a great new space within The Federation, a move that’s proved to be a real win for us already. Not only do we have the space we need to run client projects from (when co-location on client site isn’t an option), but it’s ideal for running the internal and community events that are a core part of what Equal Experts is all about (see below for more on that).

Membership of The Federation helps us provide more than just another office space – it’s great being part of a wider community, and one which is very much aligned with our own values.

New opportunities to work with us

As you can hopefully tell from the above, the last 12 months have seen real success in terms of growth and the variety of our work in the North – and we don’t intend to stop now. The plan for the next 12 months is to continue to grow our existing bases in Leeds and Manchester, as well as expand into new markets where we have identified opportunities – Sheffield and Edinburgh in particular.

We’re always keen to hear from highly skilled, experienced software engineers able to work in these areas – as well as potential clients that could benefit from our services and approach, of course! Do get in touch via helloUK@equalexperts.com if you feel either description fits.

Join us at an ExpertTalks near you

As well as our client work, we’ve been working hard to help enrich what’s already an amazing software community here in the North. Our ExpertTalks meetups have been held in Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Scotland, and we’ll continue to be host these events over the coming months.

If you haven’t joined us at ExpertTalks, you’re missing out – as well as being a great opportunity to hear insightful development experiences first-hand, they provide the tech community with a chance to collaborate in an environment well supplied with free pizza and drinks!

Join your nearest ExpertTalks group and we’ll hope to see you at an event soon:

• ExpertTalks Leeds
• ExpertTalks Manchester
• ExpertTalks Sheffield
• ExpertTalks Edinburgh