Entelect’s Retrospectives

2022 has finally seen the easing of COVID-19 restrictions across the globe. After roughly 2 years of unprecedented lockdowns and regulations, it has been great for Entelectuals and our customers to be able to safely come together once again, in person, to cement the bonds and relationships that were formed through online collaboration over the last couple of years.

The State of Technology survey this year includes 958 responses from professionals across a wide number of disciplines, industries, organisations, projects and technology stacks. Below are some of the stand-out insights for this year’s survey.

Cloud adoption has continued to rise significantly with the establishment of data centres in South Africa by the big public cloud providers AWS and Azure over the last few years. These data centres, along with the acceleration of digitisation programmes brought on by the pandemic have seen us work closely with our customers to embrace the cloud to realise the time-to-market, scaling and optimisation opportunities they present. Expertise gained through delivering cloud solutions on Azure saw Entelect earn the Microsoft Azure specialisations in Modernisation of Web Applications and AI and Machine Learning this year.

On the programming language front, C# has seen an increase in relation to Java on our projects with a slight increase in Typescript relative to Javascript., continuing the trend of recent years in our most used languages. Python and Kotlin continue to see significant uptake due to their popularity in the data science and Android environments.

PostgreSQL and Redis have seen significantly increased usage over the last year with cloud-native data stores such as Cosmos DB and DynamoDB also seeing an increase in usage due to continued adoption of the cloud. There has been an increase in the use of polyglot persistence strategies with the number of specialised data stores increasing, allowing teams to use the best tool for the job as the volume and utility of data and analytics grows.

On the cultural and training side of things, Dev Day, Entelect’s biannual internal conferences, were hybrid events attended by over 1,800 attendees, held in-person in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, as well as streamed to watch party locations across the globe including Harare, London and Amsterdam. Along with the excellent talks by our own Entelectuals, the international speakers this year included Jon Skeet of Stack Overflow fame, who emphasised the benefit of pet projects for personal growth. The other international speaker this year was Gene Kim, author of "The Phoenix Project" and co-author of "The DevOps Handbook" and "Accelerate" which have been highly influential on the way we work with our customers, utilising agile and DevOps practices to continually deliver value to our customers.

Our other initiatives, the Entelect Challenge, University, IITPSA and Company Cup hackathons were also hosted again and were huge successes. Tech Accelerator, which gives employees the opportunity to work on personal projects, also grew in scope this year with 34 projects run by 72 Entelectuals. 13 projects made it to judging with 11 Sharks (judges) deciding on the top 5 projects sharing the R70k prize pool. It was truly inspiring to see the talent and creativity demonstrated in the execution of these projects.

2023 promises to be another exciting year, starting off with the biggest Graduate Bootcamp yet of 127 graduates. As always, we look forward to exciting new projects and challenges and the opportunity to help our customers succeed.