2014 Retrospective

Happy New Year!

As we move solidly into February, if feels like the year is moving fast, but so are we! Everyone on our team spent the last month determining our 2015 company goals and how to implement them. We have expanded on our core values of professional development and community engagement to find new ways to do what we currently do even better. We have lots of new ideas for pairing, how to be even more proactive and tighten communication across the entire team. We are planning additional open source projects, community talks and meetups and together we have set aside even more time per week to focus on these fun projects. But perhaps most importantly, we are taking on the challenge to become leaders in agile remote development work.

Beyond the exciting new spaces we are creating together to do work in meaningful and fun new areas, it is worth looking back on some of the highlights of 2014

• Steady expansion of client projects and the growth of our exceptional team. We invested in an office that is over double the size of our last office in Quito with new conference rooms and a bright, beautiful open work space for up to thirty team members. The US office will also be moving in 2015 to accommodate the growth that we anticipate in NYC.
• Our Quito office has become a training hub where staff members gather to learn together in Agile, Haskell, business development, project management and a host of other topics. We have had the cross-pollination of expertise on our team visiting from the US, Colombia, Brazil, and Poland in 2014 and had new staff members arrive late January from Brazil and Ukraine. It was a great opportunity to share different experiences and strengthen our team. We visited different places in Quito, played soccer, and hiked in Cotopaxi National Park. We had two very productive, collaborative, and satisfying weeks and look forward to their next visit.
• Quite a few of our staff presented at (and attended) conferences around the world in Brazil, Colombia, Ukraine, Uruguay, Ecuador and the United States and at various tech meetups worldwide. Justin is scheduled to talk in Poland this month about Haskell at the Lambda Days conference.
• We have been actively posting technical blogs throughout the year, some of which have started conversations with new clients and new devs who are impressed with our level of knowledge.
• We had a number of TV and radio interviews about our work with other tech companies teaching university students about industry best practices in Ecuador.
• We have presented at a number of universities throughout Quito and at the ESPOCH, one of the largest tech universities in Ecuador outside of Quito. We have multiple invitations for additional talks this year.
• Stack Builders was a finalist for NYC tech companies in the SmartCEO Voltage Awards and Lori Leitgeb won a SmartCEO Brava award for exceptional women CEOs in NYC who give back to the community.

2014 was a year full of growing as a team, taking ourselves to another level, and enjoying the challenges of expanding client projects. It is gratifying to see how this effort we have invested in internally is opening many new doors for us individually and as a company.

Thanks to our clients for sharing the journey with us this last year and to every staff member who has gone above and beyond to make this company amazing. Here is to 2015. It is indeed off to an incredible start.