2016: a web agency growing up

The resolutions we stated in our last post focused on a few points: training, consulting, in-house products and more delegation. We delivered on every one of them:

• new people joined us and helped free up our time;
• we worked hard on DatoCMS, which is already a rewarding product today;
• we had an intense off-site consulting experience, with me personally spending three months working alongside a startup.
• we're exploring how to integrate UX methodologies to offer as consulting before development, a topic very close to our hearts.

On the training side, besides organizing the industry conferences we promote, Better Software and RubyDay in Florence, we kept up the team's internal training:

• ReactJS was crowned our framework of choice for JS applications;
• we became experts in the JAM Stack for next-generation static sites;
• thanks to Marco, we ran a couple of workshops on BEM practices for frontend development
• we explored the new horizons of Elixir and Phoenix.

Our big fail was the office: we wanted to move, and it was one of our strongest resolutions, but it was really hard to find a place that could satisfy the refined tastes of this bunch of nerds! For a few months we tried splitting up, taking over an entire coworking space near our office, but there's no way around it: we like being all together! Now the need is pressing and we have to find a solution as soon as possible. If you know of a nice techy office for about 20 people, we welcome suggestions, and once again we promise a housewarming party!

For the curious, I'll go into a little more detail about this year, which had one motto in particular: grow up. And we can be more than satisfied, because everything went exactly in that direction.

This year has made the developers much more mature.

On the business side we had several goals, including broadening our client base. Working directly for major clients such as Unicredit, Unipol, AIFI, Firenze Fiera, Colliers and the Istituto Diocesano has been very rewarding.

On the museum front, we continued our close collaboration with the Opera del Duomo di Firenze, for whom we developed the new management system for the Choir Books archive, as well as an app that syncs the tetragrams with the multimedia devices inside the new museum.

In the last part of the year we built a fully custom web app for buying tickets online for the winter promotion, entirely built with React, React Native and GraphQL.

The ticket purchase flow for the Duomo Firenze winter promotion

Another important ticketing system, with no intermediaries, is the one we built for the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, which for a few months now has been able to sell tickets online through its new institutional website, also redesigned and managed by our team.

Finally, a huge source of pride this year: winning the tender to rebuild the Gallerie degli Uffizi website: we're just getting started, but winning the project and scoping it properly took a great deal of effort in the last quarter. We're talking about one of the most important museums in the world, and this project will be a source of pride for us as well as an enormous responsibility.

The team during the technical site visit at the Gallerie degli Uffizi — photo credits Marco Zampetti

Tweegs is a startup we've been working with since summer 2015. The project is so ambitious and complex that it required a three-month on-site consulting engagement at their offices in the Marche region, from June to October. It wasn't easy to decide to be away from Cantiere for so long, with all the consequences that distance can bring. But we weighed the risks (earthquakes aside) and the opportunities for the "professional growth" of the whole team, whether or not they were involved in the project.

the platform that aims to revolutionize the construction industry

Back home, after three months

It was an experience as interesting as it was challenging, one that let us focus entirely on a single project for a long time, work with great people like Salvo Mica and Alessandro Leone, whom I'd like to thank, and work alongside top professionals like Alberto Balestreri on the financial side and Fabio Viola on gamification. The story goes on, but that's another story.

Working with clients abroad is a goal we've been pursuing for a long time, and launching the LeanPanda brand and our English website was one of the key steps that started to pay off this year.

It took months of development to build the new website for L’Officiel, the French luxury and fashion magazine with a global presence. The site, going live in mid-January, is a publishing platform that connects about 20 countries around the world with advanced features for sharing, translating and managing premium content.

We also worked for a major architecture firm — Andraos Associates in London — on their project Artefatto, an online magazine of high-end interior design products.

Born out of an internal need, it became clear to us that the static site market is growing fast. There's an important gap to fill: letting clients manage their content on their own, as they have for decades thanks to Wordpress and similar CMSs. Dato is the result of an investment we're convinced is the right way forward, even if some skeptical clients initially find it hard to grasp.

Since the public beta release at the end of September, we've received hundreds of pieces of feedback from developers around the world who have tried the product firsthand and enthusiastically published their sites. In fact, Dato now powers several dozen live sites, including AIFI, Policy Genius, Hanno.co, Sivetur, Filmtank, Acacia Firenze, Artefatto, Santa Maria Novella, just to name a few.

We're experiencing firsthand what it means to "be a startup".

Every year brings departures and new arrivals that we want to acknowledge and thank. Lorenzo Masini, after almost four years (the typical life cycle of a developer), went back to our friends at Develer, who for their startup GreenApes also hired the young and promising Elise, who was with us throughout her training period. We also said goodbye to the two Danieles, who were with us for a few months. Finally, we say goodbye to Laura Giovannetti, who held on longer than expected in a stoic attempt to build a sales department that just isn't us. Thank you for being with us!

We also like the idea of publicly introducing our new arrivals: Matteo Manzo, with us since last winter after a training experience in London, is the team's young and promising mascot. Andrea Gherardi, frontend specialist, joins Cantiere after a good 5 years in Australia surfing and coding for cool startups! Amir Ati, the evangelist designer, the yogi of lean UX, can show off all their purity here. Claudio Benvenuti, a collaborator before 2016, chose Cantiere as a home, where they were welcomed with open arms as a youthful-looking sage. Giuseppe de Martino Norante — known to most as Ing. Norante — is the real-life fairy tale of a client so satisfied they wanted to work for their supplier: how could we say no! And finally Joe Yates, who has been orbiting around Cantiere as a friend for years and this year decided to back the cause in a much more substantial way.

Together with our consultant Alessandro Garuglieri, we drew up a 3-year business plan, but out of mercy for the handful of readers who made it this far, we'll spare you the dazzling projections!

In short:

• we'll move offices and keep growing in numbers
• we want to significantly expand our international business
• we'll keep investing in DatoCMS and take it to the next level
• we want to get better at the project analysis phase, helping clients and startups optimize their investments and reduce risk
• we want to get better at telling our story, post on the blog more often and create better, more thorough case studies

Will we succeed? We'll certainly try, as always! In the meantime, we're happy to wish everyone a great 2017!