Sayonara 2018, and Hello 2019 - A Year In Review 🎊

The year of 2018, what an incredible year of growth and success. Now that 2018 is done and dusted, I thought it would be a good chance to take a moment to reflect and look back at the awesome things that we have achieved in the last 12 months at Sentia. This is the best way for us to learn and continuously grow as a team and as a company. Last year, we worked on some pretty interesting projects. This gave us opportunities to use new and exciting technologies across our web and mobile projects. There were a few that stood out in particular which I’ll elaborate on more below. Firstly, one of our largest mobile projects had us working with hardware where we had to integrate a tag with the app. This was first for us, and a challenge for the entire team. The tag is a small device, similar to the electronic toll tag. The idea behind the tag is that when a user of the app would put one in their car, we would be able to record data around a driver’s performance and car use. Things like braking, turns, speeding and how many times a driver went out for that late night Maccas drive. It knows.  It even automatically detects when a user is starting to drive! Pretty cool, huh. This scope of work had many moving parts to it which involved development around linking with the tag, syncing, data transfers, and of course testing. Now you can imagine, this tag was recording enormous sums of data. How is all this information managed? This actually leads me to our second mention. We managed to successfully record thousands and thousands of lines of driver data into our database and, in real time, generate information using that data without slowing app performance. To the user, it’s a simple pull down to refresh, but behind the scenes, it’s a large number of database queries fetching data. This work spanned across several sprints and involved careful planning by all teams. If you want to read more about more about this, check out Robert’s post about Creating database views with rails where he goes into this more. We learn from each project and are constantly updating our processes to better service our clients. 2018 was a year of changing some of these to improve our workflow and ensure maximum ROI for our clients. This included implementing Mobile/Web Team Leads for mentoring, to ensure that each person is continuously growing their skills and knowledge. We also introduced the role of a Project Lead, which gives the opportunity for team members to take on a leadership role and step up outside of their day to day role. We also made adjustments to our development and project management processes that strengthened our workflow. You all know that the industry we are in changes at a rapid pace, therefore it is vital to continuously adapt to stay relevant. Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash So let’s rewind the clock to January.  Our team numbers grew which created the need to move offices again.  During the final weeks of 2017, we moved to 37 York Street. We started 2018 settling into our new office, deciding on layouts, wall colours, and decor. That meant Pinterest searches, IKEA shopping, furniture assembling and a new home for Sentia’s lego. Each employee got a standing desk and there was a comfortable amount of space to decide on the furniture arrangements. We created dedicated areas for open meetings, chill out areas and, most importantly, a designated foosball area. Best of all, our Design team created an office mural that represents who we are at Sentia and our values. With the demand for more mobile applications, it was time to expand our mobile team and capabilities. We brought on more amazing members to our mobile department. For the iOS team we welcomed Leo and Maher, who was later joined by Ash and Robert B. For the Android team, we welcomed Dale, Mark, Wei and Carlos. We are also proud that our Sentia family comes from all over the world. With a much larger team (numbers grew more than double in the past 2 years), it was important for us to get to know each other and enjoy outside of the workplace environment. It was also a chance for the team to celebrate all the hard work we put in throughout the year. Some events we had were day out at Holey Moley Day and Team Bowling. We ended the year with Christmas celebrated the Sentia way. This included a Secret Santa event where we exchanged gifts anonymously. For a few people, it was their first time playing the game. With a total budget of $20, there were all sorts of gifts from whisky ice rocks to decorated mugs to a Chewbacca cookie bowl. We also held a Foosball Tournament where random teams were drawn out of a hat to compete. It was a joyous day for everyone and the perfect high note ending for 2018. 2019 is looking like things will only be getting better. We have some interesting projects in the pipeline, of which we have already kick started work with a number of new clients. They will be releasing in the coming months so stay tuned 😉. Here’s to a great 2019 💥