Christmas Message

Pascal and I wanted to recap 2018, talk about 2019 and wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Development

We delivered some interesting and diverse development projects in 2018, notably: the new STEM Ambassadors platform for the National STEM Centre in the UK, a custom Symfony application providing a central hub for organising in-school volunteers to help bring STEM subjects to life for children; climate data delivery in Drupal 8 for the Copernicus EU project, a pair of sites to help this important EU project share its findings; and a suite of websites for Hackney Learning Trust, who are responsible for the delivery of education services in the London Borough of Hackney.

Design

It’s been a big year for our design team. It’s the first year ever that Code Enigma have designed every new website we delivered, which is a huge milestone for Justine and Aaron, and the business.

SysOps

On the systems side we are delighted to see our service transition to AWS in 2017 pay dividends; our service reliability has improved enormously and we’re leveraging the power of a larger, elastic platform. We’ve been able to move forward with various initiatives and significantly broaden our product offerings.

For our government customers, we successfully re-listed all our services on Digital Outcomes and Specialists and G-Cloud.

The Team

We’ve been invigorated by new hires: Lucinda Marchant joined our dev team as a Symfony specialist, David Griffiths as Operations Manager and has been leading the charge on our internal restructuring (more on that), Heather Smith is our new ticket wrangler and tech helper for support and systems and Maygen Jacques as our first ever dedicated marketing person. (If we’re honest, Maygen is the reason this message was written!) It was great to get together with new faces at this year’s Away Week in Spain, and reaffirm our company values and direction as a team.

It’s not all been plain sailing. In early 2018 we lost our dear friend and colleague, Graham Johnson. We wish his family all the best in what will surely be a difficult holiday season for them and take a moment to remember him.

We said farewell to Steve Cowie, whom we cannot thank enough for his eight years of faithful service. We were so grateful, in fact, we bought him the yacht he’s always wanted. He’s currently working for one of our esteemed customers, St John’s College, on their new Drupal 8 intranet and still available for weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.

What’s next?

We’ve done some significant internal restructuring to streamline delivery to our clients via team collaboration, and sharing ownership of processes and decisions more openly.

We now have clear direct contacts and they are:

• Development management: Pascal Morin
• Project management: Alessandra Sturani
• Design services: Justine Pocock
• Systems and hosting services: Jamie Wiseman
• Support services: Dan Smith
• Sales: David Griffiths
• Finance: Greg Harvey

We’re delighted Moisés Rodriguez Carmona and Renars Dilevka, (both of whom have been freelancing for us as Drupal and Symfony developers respectively) are joining us full time. We’ll welcome Matthieu Decorniquet, joining the systems team in February as our Linux systems administrator.

We’ve improved our delivery processes and you can expect a renovated deployment process, more focus on automated testing and more robust user acceptance processes. We’ll be rolling important changes out, but we’ll let you know as/when you are affected.

Support

On the support side, we are simplifying our billing model and working on a new “disaster recovery as a service”, platformed at AWS. More in Q2.

You can expect to hear from us more. As part of our program of better collaboration, we’re going to work harder to help our clients get the services they need.. Our ‘retainer’ program is expanding to include design services and our project management is becoming over-arching, rather than only for development projects, so we can be both proactive and reactive.

So…

There’s nothing more to do except wish you all the best for the holidays, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, have a relaxing time — and here’s to a fantastic 2019.

Yours, Greg Harvey and
Pascal Morin