Before embarking on the new year ahead, let's stay docked for a while, and take a moment to reflect on what happened in 2023. ⛵️
What happened in 2023?
The biggest news is: we now have an apprentice! 🍾
In September, Maximilien joined us. He's a student at the Nantes University. He has joined us for 2 years as a developer, and mainly as a backend developer.
Since there are now only two of us (almost three with Lucas), we've had to improve our internal communication and project management.
Our processes
As mentioned earlier, we needed to improve some of our processes: project management and internal communication.
Before Maximilien's arrival, as we were two experienced developers with freelance experience, we were fairly independent and autonomous: we both knew what we had to do. Of course, we exchanged views on our work, and kept each other informed of our progress. But with Maximilien, we had to have a clearer vision of the progress of each project, so that we could quickly give him assignments.
So the first step to do so, was to add, what we call Dailies, to our routine: the goal is to give at the end of the day an overview of what we have accomplished, where we need help, etc. To make sure that we're all on the same page.
At the same time, we started every Monday afternoon (because we do 4.5 days a week, Monday mornings are off) to take stock and define the week's tasks.
Finally, we've decided to start work on our in-house solution to replace ActiveCollab, which we currently use for project management. This new tool will be our Control Center (yes, it's its name! 😎): task and client management, kanban, etc. A tool adapted to our specific needs.
We'll be keeping you regularly informed of developments.
What did we work on?
Let's have a look on some of the projects we've been working on!
Internal management tool of FlyTheNest
Since 2021 and the production launch, a maintenance contract has been in place, so we've kept the application up to date and fine-tuned it since then.
They also asked us to add a new calculation based on the hours worked or projected for each user. With this data we calculated the monthly staffing rate for each user; they also wanted to display the monthly availability rate.
Typofonderie.com
Numerous additions have been made to the site: completion of the light version launched last year, enhancement of the webfonts pages (a free tool enabling policy buyers to build a package to help them use their purchases on their website), …
Also, we added the In Use pages: it's a section that display practical usage of Typofonderie fonts by their customers. A basic CRUD to build, control via the administrator area, and data coming from their old website database to recover.
At the end of the year, we began designing a new section: the Gazette, which is the blog part of the site. In addition to development, this involves using a script to retrieve and add 20 to 30 years' worth of data to our database!
Paris.fr
As part of the call for tenders we won at the end of last year, we were asked to carry out two projects for the Paris City Hall website: the redesign of certain parts of the site with a view to the 2024 Olympic Games, and work on optimizing accessibility.
MyDCIM
Over the past year, we've continued to maintain the MyDCIM application on behalf of the French Ecological Transition Ministry: adding new features, factoring and optimizing/cleaning up code, …
What about 2024?
As mentioned earlier, we're going to define Control Center: its functionalities, its design, and so on.
In a previous summary, we told you that we'd built a library to quickly build an administration panel on our customers' websites. Thanks to the hindsight gained from using this library, we've come across a few blocking limitations. We therefore decided to build v2 of this library, with the experience gained over the last few months.
Starting in April we'll be welcoming an intern, so there will soon be 4 of us in our offices! 😲 So we're going to have to furnish our office a bit so that we can do this in the best possible conditions!
There's more to come on the customer project front: the Gazette for typofonderie.com, a major update for MyDCIM, and much more!
See you next year for the next summary, sailor! ⚓️
