Lucky number 13! With this attitude of drive and energy we approached all challenges and tackled even the hardest tasks during 2013. Looking back, we can say it turned out to be one hell of a year filled with lots of interesting projects, new achievements, and memorable moments.
New office in San Francisco
For our team this year started with an adventurous challenge – to set up and develop our new office in San Francisco. Our values of excellence in performance and innovative approaches helped us smoothly join the international tech community of Silicon Valley. Now we are happy to be a part of ecosystem where the next big thing is about to happen.
New awesome projects
We strongly believe that great products are created by inspired individuals, and this year have worked with some bright startups and together create some really cool products in the fields of productivity, entertainment, law, news, and mcommerce. Fascinating design and smooth animations of Counter for AdSense, many user tests behind Challenge Accepted, and numerous Scrabble games while working on the app for Merriam-Webster – these took a lot of work but helped us create great apps and deliver impeccable user experience.
Working with startups also inspired us to experiment with our own products. Thus, Saturday Idea Lab and Weekend Hackathons helped give birth to BiteHippo, a supercool iPad to-do list, and RealPixels, a special tool for Android designers.
Our innovations
This year we were driven by “automate everything” slogan. iOS developers switched to usage of CocoaPods boosting their productivity adding new libraries to projects. Our Android engineers were among early adopters of a new Android build system based on Gradle, extending it with both internal plugins that integrate application builds with our client releases delivery system and open-source projects (like Spoon Gradle plugin https://github.com/stanfy/spoon-gradle-plugin).
We kept our internal servers busy performing automate unit (based on Robolectric and Cedar) and functional UI (built with Frank and Spoon) tests both on emulators and real devices. Smooth integration of Crashlytics, Jenkins, Gitlab, Pivotal, and HipChat made our every day work more efficient and minimized time we spend on secondary tasks like opening and closing issues, linking them to commits in a code base, or starting builds on an integration server.
Yet there is still so much to be done, and we are planning a lot of enhancements to our workflow, so that the next year must be full of innovations in automation again.
Our awards
With hard work come great rewards. We were extremely pleased to be recognized by independent research companies and be included on the list of the TOP15 Android developers by Sourcingline and get to the list of Top 5 USA Android developers by BestWebDesign Agency. Cheers to us!
Mobile entrepreneurs community
Having worked in mobile space for many years now, we are happy to see more and more daring ideas and businesses interested in creating mobile apps for their users. Fueled by the startups’ interest in mobile and our team’s passion, we launched a community of SF Mobile Entrepreneurs.
Sponsored by leaders in agile development Pivotal Labs, at our community meet ups we bring together business and tech people with various experiences and approaches in creating mobile apps to share and educate each other about mobile app development process, unveil practical tips, and analyze patterns that lead to success. Our first two meet ups were a great success that we hope to continue in the upcoming year as well.
Thanks for being with us in 2013. Let’s develop, grow and stay mobile together in 2014!
Check out the brightest moments of this year in our photo report