After two and a half great years working and (occasionally) living in web.burza, I’m fast-forwarding to a new chapter on my path to make the internet a better place. Even though I’m still a kind of emotionally attached to web.burza, I took the opportunity to work in a project-oriented environment in Adria Media Zagreb (AMZ for short), one of the leading media groups here in Croatia.

AMZ is a joint venture of Sanoma Magazines International B.V. and Gruner + Jahr AG & Co. AMZ is also partially owned by Styria Medien AG. Those three companies are already having a few significant web projects in the local markets around Europe. As such, AMZ is very ambitious about being a top player in the Croatian internet space, so they were determined to secure the productive environment for a team of in-house experts.

Kristijan Soldo, the Manager of the Internet Department, approached Tomaš, Marko and me and since we set conditions and met each other’s expectations surprisingly early, we all accepted the offer very quickly.

Working on one project at the time without insane deadlines and demanding clients on a budget made a switch for me, as well as the opportunity to fully focus on a limited number of specialized internet destinations from the grounds up. To prune such a project, twist it and help it grow without lengthy presentations, argumentations or technical debates was another plus. Kristijan is a long-time internet professional with clear goals, fully confident in his team members capabilities.

Web.burza was an extraordinary place to work in, participate in handful of diverse projects, learn about new technologies and experiment with various new media concepts. My work in web.burza resulted in tremendous hands-on experience with front-end development and resulted in a few popular client-side development methods. I had a chance to deploy web standards in a real-life scenarios and practice modern web design on a dozen of high-profile projects — once again proving that there is a place for accessible CSS-based layouts beyond blogs and personal web pages.

Even though the three of us are leaving to AMZ, web.burza still has a bags of young talents fully capable to keep its position as a most awarded and innovative web agency in Croatia. With the extensive portfolio of pieces released in the last two years being visually extraordinary, yet fully standards compliant web sites/applications, web.burza set the standards for all the other local and world-wide agencies to follow.

The most noticeable projects web.burza produced in the last couple of years include web.burza.hr, www.hellgatelondon.com, www.coolinarika.com, www.vegeta.com, www.nacional.hr, www.oktal-pharma.hr, www.rtl.hr, www.borja.org, www.groovecaffe.com… as well as a dozens of small and medium business web sites…

But, the true heartbreaker is leaving web.burza people… I will miss morning coffee in the office kitchen, Mac evangelism and random photo shootings. “What if… ?” meetings and deadline overnights in the office (well, at least the social aspect of these…).

I’m not only leaving a bunch of gifted colleagues, but also a group of great friends. This is by no means a “Good bye.”, more like “See you around!”.