At the end of the year, the whole required crew gets together for our annual Christmas trip. Since we are a distributed team, this is one of the few occasions where we get to spend quality time together in-person. After going to Copenhagen in 2017, we settled for a warmer location this time: Lisbon, Portugal.Most …
Continue reading XMAS Trip 2018
In the last few years we usually combined our annual team retreat with the conference “WordCamp Europe”. Unfortunately not every team member was able to attend the event in Serbia this year. Therefore, we caught up with the whole team a few weeks later to meet at our German branch in Schwerin.The New OfficeAs of …
Continue reading Company Retreat 2018
WordCamp Europe is one of the biggest WordPress conferences worldwide. After taking place in the capital of France last year, the event moved east to Belgrade, Serbia. For us this was a great opportunity to get together, explore a new city and to meet old and new friends in the community.We arrived in Belgrade on …
Continue reading Impressions from the
We set out on a mission to reduce the repetitive work involved in managing translations for our custom built themes and plugins. Additionally we wanted to enable our clients to easily translate strings instead of having to sending translations back and forth. The result is Traduttore, a liaison between WordPress, GlotPress and GitHub. Of course …
Continue reading Improving Our Translation Workflow
On May 27, WordPress is celebrating its 15th birthday. With a market share of 30%, the most widely used content management system is facing a major change: A new editor called “Gutenberg”.Looking backAt the annual “State of the Word” in 2016, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg introduced the idea of a completely redesigned editor. Two years …
Continue reading The new WordPress Editor is coming
Why we don’t exclusively work remotely A remote team needs to develop itself and should set itself goals to become better, just like any other team. For this reason, and because some face-to-face time is vital in remote teams, I met Karin and Velthy in Berlin to discuss required‘s management topics. AccommodationOf course, we are …
Continue reading Strategy Meeting
Winter time in Switzerland means a lot of fog in the cities but lots of sun in the mountains. Since the end of 2017, LAAX has a co-working space on top of the Crap Sogn Gion, 2252 meters above sea level.That’s why I got out of the mist soup to beam myself up onto the …
Continue reading Working from 2252 metres ASL
This year I ended up deciding to go to South East Asia for three months. As recommended by friends, one of the destinations was KoHub, a co-working space in Ko Lanta, Thailand.This ended up being a great decision. I was able to get away from the cold Swiss winter and meet great people from all …
Continue reading Working at a tropical co-working spaceIn a typical office environment, it’s easy to walk over to your teammate’s desk when you have a question or need help. But since we’re a remote team, we don’t see each other physically. We would like to share our story of why we became a remote team and the challenges we deal with day …
Continue reading Why we are a remote teamTo have a good time with each other and to eat good food: These are two important points for when we see each other in person. As a distributed team, we see only each other occasionally at different events. Therefore, the time together is very rare and so precious.As a remote team, we need to …
Continue reading XMAS Trip 2017Origin StoryBefore I used to work at required in 2013 Silvan found out that I lived in Switzerland from a discussion on GitHub and asked me if I wanted to help organize WordCamp Switzerland in 2014. @grapplerulrich so you were at WCEU too? Would you be interested in helping out with @wordcampch 2014? — Silvan …
Continue reading WordCamp Bern 2017On May 2017, WordPress turned 14 years old. Initially started as a fork of a software called b2, WordPress has grown to be the largest content management system in the world. It currently powers over 28% of the web. Soon, we will see perhaps one of the biggest changes to the core of WordPress: the editor.At the annual State …
Continue reading Hello GutenbergWordPress is popular because it’s free, open source and easy to use. The global WordPress community is what makes the software and its ecosystem so powerful. Tens of thousands of people go to WordPress meetups and WordCamps every year. Around WordCamp Europe this year in Paris, a different kind of event took place: the WordPress …
Continue reading WordPress Community Summit 2017We met in Paris for a WordPress conference, invited our partner, friend and photographer Boris Baldinger and had a personal branding photo shoot for each team member.At required we have built a remote culture where everyone can live their individual lifestyles and work from wherever on this planet they want to be. Each team member is …
Continue reading Photo Shoot in ParisWe built a custom home page for Swisscom magazine for small and medium-sized enterprises to show static content alongside dynamic posts.
Continue reading Customizing a magazine front pageThe yearly WordCamp Europe is always set a year in advance in our calendar. As a remote team, we use this opportunity to catch up with each other by combining the conference with a company retreat. That’s why we extended the conference weekend into a full week of co-working in Paris. Paris I Paris II …
Continue reading WordCamp Europe in ParisDominik, Karin, Pascal and Velthy spent a week in Bilbao to get some work done and to attend the local WordCamp on the weekend.Pascal and Dominik both talked about the fields of internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n). In an area where people speak both Spanish and Basque, that was a pretty suitable topic. Our apartments Bilbao …
Continue reading Work Week & WordCamp BilbaoIt’s with great pleasure that we announce WordPress core developer and former release lead of 4.6, Dominik Schilling joined our German branch as a full-time WordPress developer.We invited him to stay with us for WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna and he began his trial period later in 2016 after shipping WordPress 4.6 on time.According to Dominik, …
Continue reading Dominik Schilling joined requiredInternationalization and localization are two important parts of software development and design. Unfortunately, it’s an area that’s often neglected or not fully understood. This article gives an introduction into the fields of I18N and L10N along with many examples and useful resources.
Continue reading On Internationalization and LocalizationLet’s take a moment to look back at a successful 2016. We had the pleasure to build amazing projects for amazing clients in our 4th year as required. People Projects WordCamps Sponsoring Retreat & Pictures Fun Facts Remote for the win Looking Forward In the last 3 years we built a special page for our …
Continue reading A quick recap on 2016I’m thrilled to announce that Ulrich Pogson has joined required as a part-time WordPress developer back in August 2016.We met in person as co-organisers for WordCamp Switzerland and invited Ulrich for a trial with us after we got to know him better. Besides developing outstanding solutions on large client projects with us, Ulrich runs a …
Continue reading Ulrich Pogson joined our team as WordPress developerSome people in our industry are writing long and detailed business plans before they start with an idea or a product. Others just build stuff in order to do what they love to do. I never planned to be self-employed or even run my own company. It just happened somehow by doing what I love. I’d like to …
Continue reading The journey of FreshjobsAlthough we are still very young – we founded our company at the beginning of 2013 – our history started way before the name required emerged.
Continue reading A brief history on required and why the + is goneThis post was written in WordPress. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since we are a WordPress agency. But for the last couple of years, this website was rarely updated and there was a good reason for that.
Continue reading A focus week got us our new (WordPress) websiteKarin talked at WordCamp Vancouver about our journey with Freshjobs.ch – a job board for Swiss web professionals. The talk is intended to be a business talk. She’s going to share our experience in designing & building an online platform on top of WordPress. Karin will share some secrets and learning from running and maintaining …
Continue reading The Journey From A Side Project To A WordPress Agency