First year at Integrity, First Year of Pure Awesome

This week is my one year anniversary at Integrity. This has, by far, been the most rewarding experience of my life - I get the opportunity to build great things every day and get paid for it, too!

I’ve been very lucky in my career opportunities in the past couple years. You see, I’m not one of those college grads with a fancy degree in computer science or programming. In fact, all of my development knowledge is self-taught. To me, going to college was something wealthy kids did, or ones that could get scholarships. Because of my odd situation, I rarely qualified for scholarships. Even when I did, it wasn’t enough, and I certainly couldn’t afford to pay for school on my own. So I never went. Instead, I took advantage of the very thing that you are using right now to read this blog, and what currently allows me to pay my bills at the end of the day: the Internet. That, coupled with my desire to learn how to create on this seemingly endless medium, is what eventually made my job here at Integrity possible. And if Integrity wasn’t willing to take a chance on me, with not having a degree and all, I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry, and you’d probably be watching another cute video of a cat doing cat things.

I feel that we are kind of spoiled in our office, and I love it. We have certain perks no other company would dream of offering. For example, between coding up a Facebook contest for a beer industry giant and creating a CRM for a national pharmacy, you’ll probably find me and a handful of other Integrity employees hovering over the foosball table (you will most certainly hear us). It’s gotten so fierce, that as one co-worker puts it, “We’re going 3D with it”: If the ball isn’t in the air at least four or five times in a couple rounds, something’s wrong. That’s exactly why I love this place. There are lasting friendships being built along side the pure Internet awesomeness.

In just one year, I’ve seen Integrity grow from about 18 employees to over 30. Just this weekend, a co-worker and I upgraded our IT infrastructure, going from a wall-mount server rack, to a full-blown air conditioned, remotely monitored server room with Dell standalone racks (which may not mean much to most, but to IT people, it’s pretty cool). This rapid growth means two things to me: 1.) Job Security 2.) We must be doing something right! In the past year, I’ve had the rare privilege to be sitting in a bar and look up to the TV to find an ad for a site or contest that I either helped build or witnessed being built. That is one seriously satisfying feeling, knowing our work will be seen by thousands, if not millions, of people (we even had an infographic broadcast in Times Square). In short, I love the work Integrity has been doing for our clients. We’re making the web a little bit better one corner of the Internet at a time.

So, cheers to the first year. May it be the first of many awesome ones to come!

Written by Brandon