My first months at Finaps aka FUNaps

Amsterdam, 10 - 2021

It is like a scene from a bad movie: on my first day of work the road is slippery and I fall off my bike just as I arrive at the office; my jeans are dirty, my tailbone is throbbing with pain, and worst of all, I am two minutes late.

In order to bring some consistency into the month, I ended up needing first aid in my second work week, because I stood on glass with my bare feet (my shower door decided it was time to fall off the wall); and as icing on the cake, two weeks later I tested positive for Covid-19, resulting in almost three extremely unpleasant weeks of quarantine.

None of the above turned out to be serious, but it certainly was a turbulent first month at work.

Warm welcome
Fortunately, my private life does not have a 1-on-1 relationship with my work life, otherwise it would have been a tough month. Luckily I was able to go to the office on my first day to pick up my laptop, and meet some other colleagues. However, on most days I work from home, which is kind of a strange situation when you start working at a new company.

Greeting your new colleagues online over a video call does not compare to a real life interaction. However, one advantage of all these virtual Teams meetings is that you cannot forget the names of your co-workers, as they are all presented on your screen right in front of you.

My team and I are having meetings at the end of each day, where we do not talk about work but instead we chat. My team gave me a very warm welcome, and I already feel as if I know them for longer than 2 months. This is due to the fact that there is lots of room for fun, laughter and encouragement. I already spent quite some after hours on games of Geocaching with some of my colleagues. And when I finished my first task at a client, my teammates applauded for me.

I found this to be a great start and certainly helped negate the alienation you feel from working from home, especially for me as a new team member!

Mini-project
All of the business engineers working at Finaps work with Mendix. Therefore, in the first part of the onboarding trajectory, the business engineers follow some Mendix trainings. I found this period to be very informative but also occasionally exhausting to follow online.

Personally I prefer learning on the job, and thankfully Finaps arranges a hands-on learning opportunity after the training period where new joiners will be working on their own so-called mini-project. This means that they will create a new app from scratch, and decide what the purpose of the app is. I had many ideas for my mini-project, and I was very eager to start building one of the apps that I always wanted to use myself. After long conversations with friends and family about which apps on my wishlist to choose (I figured I would probably not often get the opportunity to work on my own project while being paid), I decided to make the app that lets users keep their own grocery lists and recipes. I named the app GrowCipe.

The recipes can be self-written or easily retrieved from an external website using the website's URL. Besides that (and this is the main reason for creating this app), users can easily transfer ingredients from their recipe to a shopping list. I must say, it was a very fun and educational way of learning Mendix, and the result is astonishing, if I do say so myself. Considering I had no prior knowledge, I was able to put together an app from scratch in a short amount of time. I found this one of the big advantages of Mendix.

FUNaps
I am very happy with my start at Finaps, I think more fun and inspiring times are yet to come. I am very curious what else Finaps has in store for me!