2013! On a right path, still a lot to reach the goal

by Ivo Lukač -

A year ago, while concluding year 2012, I wrote 2 simple goals for the company in year 2013. To be more efficient as a team while maintaining level of engagement. By engagement I mean all time that is spent for education, helping the community, charity or just in communication with all possible peers.

So after we had 2012 as a "resource growth" year, 2013 was more for making the team more efficient. We did various actions to achieve more with the same number of people and we managed to that. A very rough estimate shows 20% more efficiency. We achieved that by spreading the knowledge internally more faster, also by setting some processes and finally by working more as a team using right people for each task.

For example we had:

  • 2 times a full 2-day internal workshop for the whole team. We used the time for learning new tools but also working on the common ground for our future web projects. It is a big investment but worth doing it
  • the whole crew was again part of the eZ Publish Summer Camp - remember the motto: learn & fun
  • started to do regular "share" sessions to introduce new ideas/tools/features to the whole team

Besides working on web projects, we maintained the level of engagement with various activities:

  • Presented on several conferences: JBoye in Aarhus, Croatian Linux Conference in Zagreb, eZ Unconference #2 in Montpellier
  • Also participated on several: eZ Summit in Cologne, FFWD.Pro in Zagreb, RLTM in New York, SymfonyCon in Warsaw, Geek Gathering in Osijek, eZ Engineering Workshop in Dusseldorf, several CISExFriday's, ZgPHP and Web Camp in Zagreb
  • We got the Extension of the year eZ Award for eZ App Factory
  • Organised our own event for the 2nd time: ezsummercamp.com :) sponsored bunch of students to join the camp too
  • Gave 5 lectures about eZ Publish and Symfony on 4 different universities
  • We pulled of a small project of our own. Its a web site for aggregating show schedules of several theaters, nothing big for beginning
  • Written 23 blog posts on our blog, few on share.ez.no too
  • We restarted The eZ Publish Show and had 6 very interesting hangouts
  • Worked on several community extensions/bundles of ours (nglanguageswitcher, eztags, ngresponsiveimages, ngconnect, ngpush)
  • We sponsored 2 local conferences: ZgPHP and WebCamp 
  • Did a pro bono web project for The Association of Epidermolysis bullosa patients
  • We organised 2 meetups on general CMS topics (Content Management Around The World), one in New York, the other in Zagreb
  • Written numerous week reports on our Google+ profile
  • Did lot of posting on our Facebook page and huge amount of tweeting on personal and company profiles :) 
  • I was personally involved in the eZ Product Inonvation Board, was a jury member for the student business plan content and finished my CISEx board mandate

This year was quite disruptive for our process of developing web sites. With more and more people using mobile and tablet devices, web projects need to handle this properly either by using responsive/adaptive layout or by implementing special layout for each device. We kind of went with the responsive path as we are mostly doing content web sites. Some of the launches we had last year include:

More to come this year. 

Speaking about 2014. our goals are simple again:

- Work even more efficiently by reusing features as much as possible
- Improve the engagement level
- Maybe hire some new people 

Back to work :)

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