It's been a blazing summer so far this year and Europe has been gripped by (possibly?) the hottest heatwave since records began. So what did we do for our Away Week 2018? We headed to Spain, of course. You know, the hardest steel is forged in fire and so on. Yeh, not that, we mostly melted. I digress…
This blog is just a quick summary of where we're at, what we've been up to and where we think we're going next. It's been a strange 2017/18 for us. We've laughed, we've cried, we've had great successes and hard moments, some people have left us, but new faces have brightened our surroundings. And some familiar faces have come back around too.
Let's start with the leavers. Very sadly we lost two dear friends this year. Back in October our colleague J-P Stacey - who was contracting for us and working on the Hackney Learning Trust project we delivered in January - died suddenly. He was much loved in the Drupal community and I don't think I can do better than link you to the lovely blog post Torchbox wrote about him. Then in April we also lost our hosting manager, Graham, who fought a short but brave battle with cancer. So it was a poignant moment when Jamie raised a toast to them at this year's Away Week. They are sorely missed.
(In related news, we were delighted to hear Graham's daughter graduated university with a BA Hons in Photography this summer - she got a 2:1, which all the best people get … says I - and we wish her all the best. Graham would've been enormously proud of her.)
And just last week we said so long, but not goodbye, to Steve Cowie. Steve's been a Director of Code Enigma since the start, but he decided to step down and focus on enjoying life, and good on him! His last day was last Wednesday, but he fully intends to keep doing bits of freelance work with Code Enigma and he's currently gainfully employed working on the new Drupal 8 intranet for St John's College in Cambridge. So that should keep him quiet for a bit. In all seriousness, Steve has been an absolute rock for Code Enigma and his colleagues over his eight years of service, he will be missed, though he promises he will take up a sun-lounger at the 2019 Away Week!
We also said auf wiedersehen to Mark Davies who decided to go freelance and focus on his own business in Northern Ireland ("new website coming soon" means "I've got loads of work and no time!" - which is probably good news). But as with Steve, we're keeping that one close. He actually did take up a sun-lounger this year. And a table tennis bat. (He insists they're bats.)
Goodbyes over with, we have plenty of new faces, and some old ones returning. Firstly, Lucinda Marchant (AKA "Pink Hair Guy" - she can thank Chris' daughter Annabelle for that) joined us as a PHP developer earlier in the year. We immediately put her on the STEM project, because you know, matching hair.
Moving on, we're delighted to introduce you to David Griffiths, our new Operations Manager. He joined the business a short month ago and, after recovering from the initial shock of realising what he'd gotten himself into, he's thrown himself into things, getting to grips with our weird and wonderful (I hope!) business. We're so glad he made it to the Away Week and he's already helping us to strategise, professionalise, streamline and generally be more grown-up about how we operate.
We can also welcome Heather Smith, who's going to join the support and hosting team in September as chief ticket wrangler in part, but also to help us out with devops and testing. We already know Heather, as she comes from a customer of ours (with their blessing, of course), so we're really looking forward to working with her even more directly! And she'll be the first person we've ever hired in The Netherlands, so that's a new thing too.
And, great excitement! We can't tell you who yet, as the ink's barely dry, but we also have a Marketing Manager and a Senior Drupal Developer joining in the next few months. Worth noting we're still looking for developers as well, so if you're interested and interesting, drop us a line!
On the freelance side it feels like I should mention Kristjan Lilleoja, perennial Drupal freelancer and all round good egg. He's by no means new, but he's such a part of the Code Enigma furniture now we ought to introduce him! And our first ever junior developer, Salva, has made a triumphant return as a freelancer, although he refuses to do Drupal 7. I suspect it's too complicated for him to understand.
Finally, we've had a change of personnel on the out of hours support desk, and Tamika Ellis is now helping Mig with ticket triage on the graveyard shift, so if you're a 24/7 customer and you call us out of hours, it's Tamika you'll likely end up speaking to.
Phew!
So much news! In terms of the business in general, it was lovely at this year's Away Week to start with a bit of a show and tell. And I particularly noted we were able to use the company Invision account to run through our projects. This is really significant, as growing design was a specific strategic goal for the business, and the fact that we actually designed every website we built in the last 12 months is a huge deal for us, and kudos to Justine and Aaron for keeping the faith, and Matt Fielding as well, who left the business last spring but helped pave the way for this in no small way - much of the Hackney Learning Trust work was his.
To give a quick recap, we've taken over a Symfony app for STEM (their Ambassadors dashboard), we've launched a string of websites for Hackney Learning Trust, we've almost finished a totally new website for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation in Vienna, we've been undertaking a major redesign and rebuild for several of the Copernicus program websites (an EU funded climate monitoring organisation), we launched a new website for the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome, we launched a fresh new site for an old, old client (in more ways than one), St John's College, Cambridge and we've been redesigning a website for the World Health Organisation in Lyon as well.
And that's before we even talk about all the great work the support and hosting team have been doing. There's the AWS autoscale work we've done for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in conjunction with our friends at NDP, continuing to support the Welsh Government in rolling out their live beta in Drupal 8 on to AWS, reducing page load times for Breast Cancer Care by more than half (their digital product owner was quite pleased), brand new microservice infrastructure using AWS ECS and "Fargate" for Focusrite's Ampify products, overhauling our continuous integration entirely to make it much more developer friendly, moving to infrastructure in code which in turn has propelled us towards enhanced Disaster Recovery capability, and so much more.
Indeed, financially it's also shaping up to be a bumper year. We'll be posting record turnover and profits at the end of September 2018, so 2019 is going to be about consolidating and planning what we do next. The Away Week was full of great ideas, and we also took the time to revisit our values, which really helped us focus in on what's important to the business (hat tip to David for leading on that - best "QMS training" ever).
But above all, it was a great opportunity to remind ourselves, once again, what a great set of colleagues we have. It was really nice to see everyone and, in some cases, meet people for the first time! Remote working can be strange like that, but the Away Weeks provide an opportunity for us to reinvigorate and tackle the coming year with a renewed sense of purpose.
Onward and upwards! We should be posting a new entry soon to introduce some more new faces and, who knows, maybe some new products and clients as well. Watch this space…