JibJab has been providing smiles for 14 years, and while our mission to make billions of people happy hasn’t changed, the company has grown and evolved over time.

Josh just recently celebrated his 5th anniversary with JibJab and has witnessed this evolution first-hand. In these past 5 years, he’s been a coding machine, touching nearly everything that has been produced. We asked him about his experience and his favorite memories.

1) How have things changed since you joined the staff? What’s stayed the same, if anything?

We definitely have more people working on more products now, compared to when I joined in July of 2008.

I think we’ve managed our growth well. We’ve stayed nimble, and improved our ability to move quickly in areas of interest. We worked as one team when we only had one product, and that was the way to go at the time. We’ve since split off into several smaller teams to accommodate our growth. This lets us continue to move quickly and do all these things that we want to do. At the same time, we still coordinate our efforts between different teams, since we have lots of shared technology and common areas of interest that cut across product lines.

2) What’s been your favorite memory?
It’s probably that time in late 2008 when we were all extremely worried about our servers’ ability to handle holiday traffic. My manager sat me down to describe a project to me. Now, it was a project that should have normally taken a month; I was given a week. It’s one of those crazy things with remote servers talking to each other, making images, spitting out all kinds of error conditions, handling said error conditions, and so on. Anyway, I gave it my best shot, even working on it late into the night to the point where I started having dreams about it.

When it came time to release it, everyone was surprised that it actually worked the first time through.

But as with many things that you write in one-fourth the time, it kept us going for a few years, but I was glad to finally get rid of it when the time came. I guess this is my favorite story because it reflects the lengths we were willing to go to at the time, but also reminds me not to be too attached to my code, especially since we’ll find better ways to do things. It also reassures me that we actually do find the time to clean up and things don’t just get left lying around. “We’ll fix it later” is actually something we end up doing, and I’m incredibly proud of that.

3) What are you looking forward to for the future?

I’m looking forward to shipping more products and seeing some of our investments in technical infrastructure start to pay off. A lot of new people have joined in the time I’ve been here, and we’ve only seen the beginning of what they’re capable of. So I’m really excited about that.

The free laundry service ain’t half bad, either.

And we agree! Interested in working with Josh and the rest of the JibJab team, and get your laundry done for free? Check out our Careers page for our current openings!