2023 in review

The year 2023 at Agiledrop pretty much reflected the overall economic situation in the world. After a major push for digitalization around the time of the pandemic, companies and organizations have revisited their plans and slowed down a lot of their budgets.

As a result of this, we’ve seen our clients need much more flexibility, and our value proposition of enabling them to scale up and down as required allowed us to provide it in exactly the right way.

One of our highlights of 2023 was definitely the full-on return of in-person tech conferences. We attended 14 of them, with the majority of them being Drupal-conferences, together with a few Laravel and other open-source conferences, such as MoodleMoot in Barcelona and SymfonyCon in Brussels, as well as other developer-centric events, i.e. WeAreDevelopers in Berlin.

Out of these 14 conferences, we sponsored seven: five Drupal conferences; our first Laravel conference, LaravelLive UK; and the UX design conference UXDX EMEA in Dublin.

Internally, the AgileOFF events for our employees which we introduced back in 2022 went particularly well in 2023. We organized 21 internal events, as well as the first-ever Laravel Meetup in Ljubljana which we also sponsored. In addition, we sponsored and exhibited at the local JobFair, which we’ve also been doing for years now.

Seven of the internal events were AgileTalks – a tradition that got a little neglected during the Covid times, but something that we’re planning on returning to and expanding this year.

We took more time to focus on streamlining our internal operations and applications, including onboarding and the overall employee experience. 

The most important internal development was the release of the long-awaited Agiledrop Intranet which streamlines event organization, repurposes the points gained through our AgileKarma system in our own shop, and enables us to create ongoing challenges where team members can gain additional points.

Another important tool that needed a revamp was our Careers app for tracking job applicants, originally built on Drupal 7. Last year, we rebuilt it as a Headless AST application based on Laravel and Filament. On top of these, we introduced numerous other tools and changes, such as a new server infrastructure, several AI applications, the AgileRadio, and more.

As we planned at the end of 2022, we successfully expanded into more Laravel work, as well as more projects using Symfony and those using JavaScript. We started working on a project for the University of Ljubljana using the open-surce LMS Moodle which we’re planning on getting more involved with this year, including publishing our own themes/plugins.

Our long-term partnerships have been and are still going strong, which was also reflected in the visits our developers made to client teams, and vice versa. In 2023, different Agiledrop employees made 6 trips to the client’s offices, and we had 5 visits from client teams’ members here in Slovenia.

Other important developments for us last year were mostly related to community and our own company culture. We got more and more involved in Laravel, sponsoring LaravelLive UK and attending that plus the European Laracon. As mentioned previously, we organized and hosted the first-ever local Laravel meetup with over 60 guests and 3 great talks.

We also stayed true to Drupal and its community, with numerous conference sponsorships and 82 issue credits on drupal.org scored by our team in 2023. Even more importantly, our development director Bostjan gave Agiledrop’s first talk ever at DrupalCon Europe 2023 about the importance of onboarding the next generation of Drupal engineers, which sparked a lot of interest and discussion in the community.

But probably the most notable thing for Agiledrop in 2023 was the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the company’s foundation back in September. That’s right – Agiledrop turned 10 years old last year, and we had a double celebration, both at our annual family picnic and then again in our Ljubljana office on the exact day Agiledrop was founded, September 26.

 

Thanks & next steps

I need to thank each and every member of the Agiledrop team for their invaluable contributions and dedication to the company, even during the more challenging and uncertain years. 

Our main plans for 2024 are staying committed to delivering value to our clients, while  maintaining and refining our existing set of internal tools. We’ll continue to be engaged in the open-source communities of Drupal, Laravel and others through sponsorships, talks, code contributions, interviews and more.

Wishing all our team members, readers, clients, podcast guests and friends from open-source communities a happy & successful 2024!