Split Tech City is a community composed of well-intentioned and progressive companies, startups, associations, initiatives, institutions and individuals. Together we encourage and develop the IT sector of Split and the surrounding region.
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Our local tech community is getting richer and more diverse every month. We’re happy to present to you a company that recently became a proud Split Tech City member.
The name of the company is Revendo and we talked about it in detail with Dragan Rapić, the manager of the regional branch.
Revendo is a Swiss company based in the city of Basel, founded in 2013 by two school friends with one vision:
Every used product deserves at least a second chance!
“Our concept is based on a circular economy and aims to reuse used products. We buy used electronic devices – mainly smartphones and Apple products – check them in detail, repair them if necessary, and resell them to customers,” explained Dragan.
To make this business model work, they run a webshop in Switzerland and in the EU and are also available in person to their customers in nine stores in Switzerland and one store in Vienna.
Apart from the employees in the stores, most people work at their headquarters in Basel. They also manage a service center in Bratislava with about 30 employees and have software experts right here in Split.
Dragan revealed to us that this year was very important for them to establish a core team in Split. It was a difficult process, he admits, but they managed to cover all the desired positions: DevOps, QA, and PHP engineers.
They currently have an open position for a Senior PHP back-end developer, which will help them speed up development on the eCommerce project, which is very important to them at this stage.
After that, he will focus on the business system project, where he will have to expand the team to include new PHP back-end engineers, front-end engineers, and QA engineers.
“There are plans for specific hardware projects, where we would develop solutions to help our technicians and various devices for customers to be sold in stores. We are lucky that we have good faculties at the university here in Split, where brilliant minds are created”, said Dragan positively.
When we asked him to try to single out the projects and collaborations he is most proud of, Dragan pointed out the following:
“The most important project for us as the software department of Revendo was certainly the establishment of a Croatian branch of the company and the building of a team in Split. We managed to establish a great team with excellent colleagues in a short time.”
On the technical side, this year they successfully moved all their own services to Google Cloud. Thanks to modern platform-as-a-service solutions, they can now focus more on developing beautiful solutions rather than maintaining internal servers or networks.
“In addition, we have gone through a complex process with our new trading platform, which will soon manage all e-commerce transactions,” he added.
As for the technology they use in their work, Dragan reveals that their software landscape is quite diverse – apart from some third-party solutions, they develop three of their own software products in an international team of people in Split and Basel:
“This setup is currently in a phase of continuous change and is constantly being further developed or extended with external tools, aiming to replace the legacy business system tool in the medium term and at the same time meeting the requirements of our business.”
Regarding the comparison of today’s Croatian IT scene with that of 5 years ago, Dragan says the following:
“Well, I wouldn’t compare it with the one from 5 years ago because then the Croatian IT scene was already recognized as good – we had companies with good portfolios and some new ones that are now at the very top of the Croatian IT scene.
However, if you compare it to 10 years ago, it’s a different story. At that time, IT was not an attractive business in Croatia, and many companies struggled to maintain income. Nevertheless, the hard work of all people in the IT scene led to the fact that 5 years later, Croatia has its place in the IT world.
More hard work by people in the IT scene led to the fact that today everyone wants to be a programmer because – It’s easy for us, we just type away under the air conditioner, and get a lot of money!
If you compare with the last 5 years, I would say that the biggest change is that now all doors are open to existing and young developers, as well as existing and young IT companies. The community is growing and people are willing to do their best to make it better.”
The greatest value they get from Split Tech City membership is, Dragan points out, the strength of the community:
“On the one hand, we also benefit from the community as it is comparable to an open source. On the other hand, we are convinced that something can always be learned from an exchange between like-minded people.
We would like to help young programmers who are just coming on the scene to educate them on how to be a good programmer, but also how to be an excellent employee.
It is our responsibility to educate future generations to be even smarter and better than we are now. If we don’t, all our current efforts are pointless!”
At the very end of this conversation, Dragan draws everyone’s attention to something very important:
“Don’t forget – every used product deserves a second chance!”
Revendo, welcome!
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