A web agency's 2015 retrospective

Cantiere has been growing for years on several fronts: beyond the usual revenue metric, we have grown as a team, trained on new frameworks and languages and cut our teeth using them in production; we have built applications outside our comfort zone, and we have gained experience organizing conferences. We also had to come to terms with some tough choices made the year before that weighed heavily on our overall strategy.

It all started in January 2015, when we chose a strategy of happy degrowth "in terms of the number of projects handled at the same time — in order to invest in training two new teams, in internal training and in contributing to the Ruby community and beyond", as I wrote in last year's post.

Your perspective changes along the way, and sometimes you feel so far from your goals. Then you stop, take a closer look, reread, and realize how important planning is, because it keeps you on course, even when you seem to be doing something else entirely.

So we are satisfied, because we reached many of our goals. Others we didn't. Knowing that can only do us good.

Our industry is full of acronyms we find hilarious! There are the C-somethings: CEO, CTO, CFO, COO, CPO, COO, CRO and the list goes on! LinkedIn is now teeming with CEOs of one-person businesses, and we certainly don't want to disappoint industry insiders! So, halfway through the year, we did a big organizational reshuffle, redefining internal roles and responsibilities: Luca Bonfiglio is our CEO and takes on all the headaches of this far-from-easy job! Francesco Giovannetti, already in charge of human resources, organizes events and conferences. Stefano Verna has been our CTO for years and oversees technical matters and internal training; the real news is that he has become a partner in Cantiere, welcome! Finally there's me, Matteo Papadopoulos, labeled COO, the one who defines operations, overseeing projects, quality and communication; basically I'm the dreamer who creates chaos!

Jokes aside, defining roles more clearly has helped us make our work clearer and take important decisions, making things easier for the team, which has grown quite a bit. 2015 saw the arrival of young padawans to train, like Tommaso Valentini and Elise Cicognani, in whom we are investing a lot of energy given their great potential. We have new developers who now work with us on a steady basis and will soon join the team: Claudio Benvenuti and Daniele Spinosa. A happy and unexpected return is Silvio Relli: after a break of just 4 years (very well spent with our friends at Extendi), Silvio decided to come back to the fold! Finally, Laura Giovannetti, our salesperson, who is experiencing the challenge of selling an agile method that is basically unsellable! :)

And what about those who left? Francesco Disperati, with us for four years, moved to the US to work as a researcher at a Californian university. It's a professional opportunity we obviously supported, but we reserve the right to "insult" him whenever we like (in private only) because we miss him so much! Good luck @nebirhos!

Tough moments: handing back the office keys!

An important collaborator whom we still consider part of the team, even though there are no active projects, is Nicola Woody Ferruzzi, a highly experienced iOS developer. It's interesting for us to note that, despite our sales efforts, requests for native app development have dropped significantly compared to previous years. We still consider Woody an excellent ace up our sleeve!

Finally, Alessandro Garuglieri, a business consultant — an external supplier in every respect — whom I like to think of as part of the team. He does important data analysis work for us, but his most valuable contribution is on the human side. I'd like to take this post as a chance to publicly thank him for everything he has done for us. Love.

We said training, and training is what we did! It was the year of JavaScript and single page applications. Everyone had the chance to study and experiment, both personally and in production, with the potential of ReactJS, the tool we chose in the great bazaar of JavaScript libraries. We have adopted this technology in many projects, and it has proven to be an excellent choice.

ReactJS is what we chose among all the JS libraries for SPAs

Another training topic was front-end development: after philosophizing about the benefits of BEM for web development, more than a year later we have the hands-on experience to say that it was absolutely the right choice, because the nightmare of maintaining CSS projects over time is gone! Our BEMO library has become a vital tool, and we're happy to know it's used by other agencies too! Deh!

It was our first year organizing RubyDay. Let's admit it: we were a bit scared! Then the great synergy we built with Nebulab and Welaika and the growing interest from the Italian and international community got us really excited! The event in Turin was a fascinating experience, and we are proud to say that the next edition will be held in Florence in November 2016.

Better Software has become a recurring event that brings plenty of inspiration: we were there, and we will be again.

On the other hand, we didn't keep our (admittedly very vague) promise to relaunch Florence on Ruby, which took a sabbatical year. Now FLOR is among our resolutions for 2016, and to avoid the mistake of postponing it forever, we have set a date: February 24, 2016. Don't miss it, stay tuned!

Florence is the city chosen for the next RubyDay

A varied year in terms of the projects we worked on and are still working on.

The first big project where we experienced the power of ReactJS was the new website for Bookrepublic and Librerie COOP, which we built for EXPO 2015. The stand also featured a touch screen with a dedicated version of the ebook reader. It was a really fun project to work on!

The development of the new crowdfunding platform Eppela was without a doubt a delicate and demanding job; it was a complete rewrite in Rails, and the new and old platforms had to run side by side for 40 days, due to the inherent needs of crowdfunding!

Eppela.com - crowdfunding

The work for the opening of the new Museo dell'Opera del Duomo was exciting, challenging us with new technologies and a pursuit of excellence that is motivating like nothing else.

There are promising, inspiring startups, because they want to do things right, and we really like that! One above all: Winearound, a web app for iOS and Android (built with PhoneGap/ReactJS) that lets you discover wineries and book visits to taste great wine.

We started development on a new project, Tweegs, a startup that will launch in the coming months. It's an ambitious, complex project we have been working on for months.

Another interesting project was the development of VentureUp, the marketplace commissioned by AIFI (Associazione Italiana Fondi di Investimento) that connects startups with venture capitalists, giving new entrepreneurs tools to assess what to do when looking for investors.

The presentation of VentureUP at the Sole24ore conference hall.

Of course there were many other projects, too many to list in a post like this. We like to think that at least 15 of them were built with DATO, the platform we developed to manage content for static websites, the new trend for informational websites! that convinces us more and more!

Exactly one year ago we launched Cantiere's new website. We put the foundation of what it is today online, then went through countless improvements based on usage analytics. We followed the development methodology we usually recommend to clients, which is not always fully understood: start from an MVP with no frills, build a prototype, put it online, evaluate, and improve based on the data. We are happy with the results: all our analytics figures nearly doubled compared to the previous year, and 5 of the main contracts we signed came from the website.

We resumed our editorial activity, publishing 18 blog posts that got a strong response online, both the technical articles and the others.

The daily peak of the blog post criticizing Angular.

In June we launched the English version for international markets — LeanPanda — also translating all the blog content. There were peaks of thousands of daily visits on some hot topics. We are starting 2016 on a happy note because, from a sales point of view, we are beginning to reap the rewards of this effort!

What will happen this year? We did assessments, projections, meetings, U-turns; we debated: dreamers vs. pragmatists, consultants vs. administrators; we tried to come up with a plan, and there are some key points we would like to share:

That's the watchword! We are growing, the machine runs well, everything works as it should (with room for improvement, of course!). But to do what we envision, if we want to do better than we do now, if we want happy clients, we must learn to delegate and train others in what we know how to do. That's why in the coming months at least a couple of new in-house people will be trained in our method and will look after clients and their projects.

The energy freed up will go into creating new opportunities, expanding internal training and laying the groundwork for in-house products, probably starting with DATO itself.

In particular, Stefano and I will increasingly focus on the consulting side that clients need in the early stages of designing applications. We have years of experience on this and will try to put it at their service to improve planning and subsequent development.

Finally, we're moving! After so many years, and with a heavy heart, we have to say goodbye to the peace and intimacy of our offices. There are too many of us, the space is too tight, and it doesn't let us do what we would like. We want to move by mid-year and we'll be sure to invite you to an explosive opening party, that's a promise! :)

Happy 2016, everyone.