Seven years later, I am still amazed by how much we've evolved and by how quickly we are still adapting to the new challenges we are facing.

Looking back at the first days, I remember the "interview" that was an atypical one. We met at a students' bar, had a friendly chat and got to know each other. Florin had to wait for half an hour to get me a lemonade, which was definitely not the best first experience when meeting someone new.

A few months later, we were painting the walls of our first office, a small room that could accommodate around four people. Sometimes, we were accidentally kicking each other under the desks. At present, our main office takes up one and a half floors in a building that goes by the name of "Flavia Palace", with another office in the capital city and sales representatives in the UK.

The journey goes on and we are very much excited to experience every future step of the way.

I remember seeing the 123FB job posts: they were looking for a testing engineer and support specialist. I had no idea what any of them meant, but I landed on their homepage: bright colors, a kangaroo and forms. It all seemed so jolly, friendly and cool. I could have bet that 123FB is a business from outside Romania.

So imagine my surprise when I actually read that the two founders graduated in Timisoara, same University as me, just a different specialization. And one of them is from my hometown! And they were young! Incredible! I felt the urge to meet them. So I have applied to both their job listings, although I had no expertise in any of them :). Needless to say how nervous I was at the interview, especially when the CEO, sometime towards the end of the interview told me: You must really want to work with us. I've seen that you applied to both our job offers. Instant blush and a forced smile appeared on my face.

I got the support specialist job and I was so happy. I still remember the first weeks: we were in a small office (around 10 people) and had another office for lunch. Everybody was focusing on their work, but always had time to explain or help a fellow improve. I couldn't believe that they were playing darts while working. And they were taking it seriously - with statistics & stuff.

Monthly team buildings at Pub123 (it was actually Pub323 or something like this) - helped us get to know each other, outside of work. That's when you really know a person: when you get a bit tipsy and chat. It felt like we were a family!

I can still remember I was the 24th person hired in the office, and I'm still proud of that. That year also taught me that work is fun, and I couldn't believe how much I wanted to be part of such a community with great people.

It was the year of the bathroom ghost, of embarrassing Skype calls with clients and working late into the night just because I wanted to. It's the year I went as a fragile packing box to Halloween, because I prepared no costume. Also that year I forgot to take off the price tag for the Secret Santa present.

All these taught me that it's okay to mess stuff up, as long as you can handle the jokes afterward. And the jokes... The jokes are awesome, especially the one about me trying to charge my phone while the power in the building was out.

Five years later, I'm still trying to defend my decision. Being part of 123FormBuilder is being part of a family because "team" couldn't handle everything we have and we are here.

But the jokes...

We could even have lunch, all of us, at the same table, at the same time!

Florin (the big boss) used to say that we could easily produce a sitcom, considering the subjects we used to debate. It was truly a "daily meme war" more than anything else.

Each individual was critically important to the development of the company. At that time, I was responsible with building a strong support team. This was a must for us because the way we interact with our customers has always set us apart from our competitors.

Today, I'm proud to say that each member of my ex-team has advanced into higher positions within 123FormBuilder and their experience brings incredible value to our progress.

I think this is why Management thought of moving me from one department to another (Florin likes to call me "Jolly-Joker" because of this).

Although each year has its unique story, 2015 has been the turning point of my career. It happened after key members of the Marketing Department decided to pursue their careers at other companies, somewhere in the Summer. We were left with 3 members, two with a Marketing & PR background and me - the documentation writer. Not to mention the fact that we had a mountain of objectives to accomplish, including the launch of the CaptainForm plugin for WordPress.

So we started working in Agile Scrum, copying our colleagues from Development. We took turns in scrum mastering, discussing the objectives with Florin over and over again. Luckily for us, Irina came just in time to save the day as our current Head of Marketing.

The conclusion of this story is that 2015 is a year I will always remember, switching from a regular content writer to the marketing specialist I am today. Not to mention the fact that it was the year when I started doing SEO - and I love it. Being at 123FormBuilder is something to cherish during your career, an opportunity that you cannot miss. I wouldn't lie to you.

as I first perceived them to be), which unfortunately is quite rare in the local employment market.

It was the year of a lot of firsts for me. My first Hackathon working side by side with devs until late in the night, my first real team building, attending my first big design conference at Amuse Budapest.

I re-learned how to do video editing, began to dabble into what conversions and good landing pages meant and gave my best to learn and grow as much as I could since I genuinely felt like it was worth it.

This was the year I started to better know a group of people, all new to me, who all gathered in one big office to work at something I wouldn’t have thought could be even remotely creative, let alone exciting: web forms. I soon understood that it is not the product itself, but this particularly positive, hilarious bunch, dedicated to developing the best product they could, that makes form building an exciting and rewarding job for me.

Ever since 2016 my Mondays are no longer a dread, I’m not counting days, waiting for the week to end and whenever somebody asks me if I’m still impressed with this company, my answer is still a definite YES.

When we reached Poarta Raiului located in Alba, Romania, all the bumps and bruises along the road were well worth it. The name really did the place justice - “The Gate of Heaven”.

The view. Oh, the view! We were in the middle this amazing place and the best part of it was that we would be here for three whole days!

We did a bunch of fun activities such as story time, board-games, karaoke (oh God) and hiking. It was a nice change of setting to see every familiar face I was working with each day much more happy and playful than usual. One activity that we did stood out the most for me - Mafia. If any of you don’t know, Mafia is the game where people take on roles and have to work as a community to find out who the killers are - and it was such an interesting shift to play the game with my colleagues.

The setting of it was this small village where local people and mafia members were all out in a battle for survival, with the last group standing alive being the winner. It was thrilling to secretly lynch one player while playing roles like a detective or a doctor. Our team is pretty chill, no one got upset 😀 We knew that it was only a game but it was the best game in town. Twisted plots, dramatic an fortunate wind-ups - we were all totally absorbed in playing this awesome game.

Such a sweet getaway, looking forward to the next one!