Backtick Summary 2022

Backtick Summary 2022

We're a fast moving company and we don't always take the time to look back and reflect on our past. To refresh our own memory and give outsiders a glimpse into our world, here's a quick recap of 2022 at Backtick!

Team expansion

During 2022 our team grew by 2 newcomers making us a total of 12 full time employees.

Finances

The annual turnover landed just short of 14M SEK (10M SEK 2021) with 3,2M SEK EBIT. We’ve seen a slight increase in internal spending and continue to invest in R&D as well as our employees.

34 under 34

Both Michal and Oskar attained the Rapidus annual 34 under 34 award.

Backtick Summit

Last years summit took place at MJ'S in Malmö. We kicked off the day with a conference featuring internal presentations and a session on how to optimize ourselves as engineers held by Marina at New Expansion.

After lunch, we headed to Lockarp for a race at Lockarps go-kart track.

Master's thesis and summer internships

In 2022, Backtick hosted two thesis workers and three summer internships. The thesis work was conducted by Szymon and Oscar from LTH and explored the possibility of using transformer models to categorize pull requests. You'll find the thesis here and the popular science article here.

Codecation

The Codecation hackathon 2022 took place at Villa Casanova in Benahavis, Spain. The area was familiar to us as Codecation 2019 was organized in a villa nearby. Apart from a wonderful hang-out area, the new venue featured a huge spa and great exercising areas.

This years projects included:

• Custom trained generative AI models for images

• Text to speech models able to impersonate a person from tiny voice samples

• Image to sound synthesis to experiment with spacial navigation using audio

We also had some unexpected visitors claiming some of our stuff, read more about it here.

Backtick fall adventure

The fall adventure 2022 was masterminded by Oskar and Gustav. True to tradition, the team was armed solely with a packing list, kept in the dark about the impending surprises. This years adventure took us to Tåstarp, where we delved into the arts of iron forging and wood carving. The day activities were followed by a dinner at Hotel Skansen, a much-deserved SPA session and a role playing game unraveling the mysterious murder of a peculiar painter.

Backtick birthday

As we turned 4 on September 26th last year, we invited all Backtickers together with friends and family to a dinner party at Eatery Social in Malmö.

Mandatory fun

Being a consultancy firm, we rarely get the chance to collaborate on a project with the entire team. Knowing this would be a much appreciated break from everyone's daily assignments, we wanted to create an opportunity for us to engineer something together with all Backtick employees. The name “Mandatory fun” is a playful hint at some of our larger competitors trying to incorporate team building activities suitable for everyone - something we know isn’t possible past a certain company size.

The concept is simple. We book one or two days a month and gather the entire team at the office. Our CTO Johan does the necessary preparation work so that we can focus on actually creating things rather than reading docs and setting up boilerplates. We spend the day hacking on the project and proceed to hang out in the evening (Optional Fun).

The first Mandatory Fun event gave birth to our very own Slack bot, Harold (you know which one). Apart from coming to life, Harold can now roll up our blinds, gather lunch orders, play music on the office speakers, scrape lunch menus and open the office door (a feature we had to disable due to security concerns…).

Web Summit

In the beginning of November, me (Michal) and Oskar went to Portugal for the annual Web Summit event. Having prior experience of the event, we knew that selling consultancy services would be a waste of time. Instead, we focused on networking, tying to get in touch with partners/advisors, screening startups for potential investments in and soaking in the industry trends.

The top trending topics on Web Summit 2022 were:

• Metaverse

• Sustainability

• Web3

• Crypto

• The war in Ukraine

Interestingly enough, the event occurred just before ChatGPT and Midjourney were released to the public. Something is telling me next year will have AI as the top trend again..

Data Alliance

Our CTO Johan held a presentation about python job scheduling at Foo Café in Malmö. The talk was the first session in a series called Data Alliance organized by our friends over at Data Dao. You'll find the talk here.

DigIT Hub AI - AI, sustainability and gender equality

Our Head of Science Birger held a talk at a conference organized by Mobile Heights - Digit Hub AI. Birger demystified training data bias explaining what it is, how it impacts the results and the tools we use to deal with biased data.

INKA

In the end of November, we attended a small expo at LTH organised by ISEK called INKA. The expo gave us the opportunity to talk to many curious students while promoting our Master’s Thesis advertisements.

Backtick becomes multiple companies

To streamline the process of establishing new companies, we have set up a holding company to Backtick Technologies by the name of Backtick Valley. All existing share programs were moved to Backtick Valley and the company will own all future spin off enterprises. We've made this change to ensure distinct separation between the companies and to prepare our organization for future growth. You can read more about the setup here.

New customers and partners

2022 was a year full of milestones. We would like to thank all of our new and existing customers and partners for the trust you have put in us. We're very proud of what we have achieved so far and we know it would not be possible without you 💙