Entelect’s Retrospectives
Retrospectives looks back at highlights from our year in the technical and solution-focused landscape, and the initiatives that drive our culture.
2020 was an unprecedented year with many companies (including Entelect) being forced to suddenly adapt to the reality of remote work and the nature of work itself changing significantly. We overcame most of those hurdles and 2021 has shown that Entelect’s people not only take on any challenge but also excel at making sure we “Get Things Done” no matter the circumstance.
We celebrated our 20th birthday this year with a surprise remote party disguised as a Dev Day event. Goodie boxes were sent out to everyone and we had a great time reminiscing on the journey we’ve taken so far. The event was capped off with another surprise international speaker, this time John Romero, the game developer famous for his involvement in classic games like Doom and Quake. Our other Dev Day event earlier in the year gave some of our own people a chance to present to the company, culminating in a talk from the man who brought us StackOverflow, Jeff Atwood.
As a company, we continue to grow in numbers with over 1000 professionals working together to deliver extensive value to clients in many countries around the world. This year has seen a drive towards expanding our Quality Assurance Engineer team and their presence on our cross-functional teams has already shown great value and an increase in quality all around.
As individuals, we continue to grow in skills that help us do our jobs better and help us improve as humans in general. We hosted 217 learning events over the year, ranging from quick introductory talks to more in-depth deep dives. Our in-house learning focuses on technical skills as well as many other areas like leadership and professionalism.
The use of popular enterprise languages such as Java, C# and TypeScript has held steady this year with Python being one of the few languages seeing an uptick in usage, driven by our increased involvement in data science work. Despite the industry excitement around Flutter for mobile dev, we’ve seen little uptake within our projects, however outside of their project work, Entelectuals do seem to be skilling up in that area. Kotlin continues its rapid move into the language of choice for native Android apps.
This year saw the introduction of a new internal competition inspired by our “Demystifying IoT” publication. We gave our budding IoT and electronics hobbyists a chance to show off their skills and projects and a chance to win some cool prizes. The creativity and quality of the projects were amazing and we look forward to finding more ways to unearth some of the fascinating things our people build in their spare time.
While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect every aspect of our working and personal lives, we continue to strive towards living our core values. We will continue to focus on personal growth through learning, mentorship and experience. We will continue to find ways to build and strengthen our relationships, both professionally and with each other, especially in a remote setting. And we will continue to do what we do best, deliver world-class software that in turn delivers incredible value to our amazing customers.
- Duane McKibbin: Solutions Architect