Merixstudio - the company full of passion

However, I’ve decided to expand the idea of interviews. While I was working on the articles, I found myself actually thinking ‘how cool is what you’re doing dude!’ many times. So that I’m proudly showing you that Merixstudio not only stands for software development (what, let’s face it, can be boring for non-tech people).

Merixstudio is first and foremost a bunch of extremely interesting peeps. Guitar players, sailing lovers, avid football fans, CrossFit fanatics are among us.

We’re a kind of wolfpack of people with passions that we love to share. So that here you have stories of some of our folks.

One of them is Pablo, who moved to Poznan from Spain six years ago. During the work day, Pablo is a Django Dev that is always smiling and eager to joke. We discovered his passion (and hidden talent) when he tried to sell tickets for his concert everyone at the company.

Yep, you’ve already known it - Pablo is a musician after hours, and not just any musician. Together with his band, Tortuga, they play the combination of doom and stoner metal. Our Django Developer is a guitar player and the lead singer. Pablo describes the story of Tortuga.

“I’ve been listening to this kind of music for 15 years. I like the fact that they are strongly experimental - you can hear a lot of jazz, blues or acid rock in stoner for example”.

We can say that Pablo is the father of Tortuga. He is the man who decided that he wants to start a band. “I’ve always played guitar, but I never had a band. There is a pretty wide stoner metal scene in Poland, so I thought >>why not?<<.” The way he decided to look for new band members was pretty crazy. What he did was… searching people through GUMTREE - the site for classified ads. Well, as he considers himself, he’s a brave man!

That’s how Pablo recruited new members to the band. The idea was to create heavy music with the Middle East accents. The last thing that left was to come up with the name.

“What is heavy and slow like the music we play? Turtle of course! Polish word żółw was out of the question. Turtle is not melodious. But Spanish tortuga sounds very good and is easy to pronounce - it rolls off the tongue a lot easier.” said Pablo.

As you can imagine, we were extremely curious what their concerts look like, and we wanted to see how Pablo is turning from the Developer of good humor into a dark musician. So we went to one of their events to listen to their music. I’m sorry for rather poor quality of video, but well, dark music means dark videos ;)

Fun fact about Tortuga: band members have been coming and going. There was a time when Marcin Zimmer, excellent and extremely talented jazz and bassman (who is the member of RusT right now) joined the band.

Like I mentioned before, Merixstudio is full of peeps with passion from such different worlds. It’s really cool because, thanks to that, we can benefit from various fields by sharing our hobbies and experiences.

Among our teammates are a lot of football fans. One of them is Maciej who is responsible for Human Resources at Merixstudio. In his private life, he’s a huge fan of FC Barcelona which is one of three Maciej’s biggest love - the others are his newly married wife and Gacek The Frenchie, a lovable French bulldog.

We can see all the time that Maciej’s interests are centered on football. He not only watch matches of his beloved team (and others) but also participates in them. And they are usually the moment full of emotional cheering and sporty fervor.

But the question is “Why FC Barcelona?”

I let Maciej tell his story:

"My story with the club started during World Cup in 1998. I was charmed by Holland national team that included de Boer bros, Phillip Cocu or Patrick Kluivert. After the Championships I was looking for any information about these players. This was the time when the Internet wasn’t such popular so that I used newspapers. Moving up the ladder, I discovered that football players I mentioned are members of FC Barcelona team. I was a ten-year child, so I decided to cheer them just like that."

In the beginning, Maciej was bravely keeping a close eye on his beloved team just from time to time using Telegazeta. But when technology changed it got easier to be up to date with scores.

Barcelona’s matches have become the fixed component of my life. I could say that it’s more like the ritual.

There was only one thing left - visit in the Camp Nou in Barcelona, the club’s stadium. Maciej was waiting with patience, and in 2007 he finally participated in Barça's match against Sevilla. “I remember the score - it was 2-1. Messi scored two goals.” Maciej mentioned. “It was an incredible experience, and I even felt tingly.”

The love for FC Barcelona has been growing in Maciej. Today he is an official team fan (called socio) as well as active member of the world’s largest fan club of Barcelona - Fan Club Barça Polska. The fan club even has its crest that is laid in Camp Nou.

When it comes to a number of Barca’s matches in which our HR Manager took part, we can talk about the double digits. The last one he watched live was the King Cup final when Barcelona played against Deportivo Alavés (and win 3-1). Here you have the video from that sports event.

There are a lot more of Merix folks with fascinating passions. I will describe them in the next articles. Stay tuned!