2024 in review

Overview of 2024

One of our key highlights of 2024 was a return to growth, with several key returning clients as well as new important partnerships. While the market, especially in the agency sector, remained challenging, we were able to focus more on direct clients and take on our most complex technical projects to date.

As far as technology conferences go, 2024 continued to be a strong year for Agiledrop. We attended 10 of them, 9 of which we also sponsored; 5 Drupal conferences, 2 Laravel conferences, Acquia Engage in London, the DevWorld conference in Amsterdam, and the WeAreDevelopers conference in Berlin.

Our local and internal events were even more interesting in 2024 than in all the previous years. In addition to numerous office events and several team building activities, we organized 2 free Drupal workshops, attended the traditional JobFair at the Faculty of Computer Science, and our development manager Tjaša gave a lecture on web accessibility at the Global Accessibility Awareness Day Slovenia 2024.

We also sponsored and hosted 2 Laravel meetups; both took place in our headquarters in Ljubljana, which also underwent a major renovation at the end of the year, allowing for even more team activities and an even stronger team spirit going into 2025.

But our Ljubljana office wasn’t the only thing that received a key upgrade in 2024. In June, we published our refreshed website, this one based on the headless Storyblok CMS rather than our traditional Drupal setup. Then later in November, we became a Storyblok Certified Partner, and now provide this expertise to clients either already using or considering Storyblok CMS.

This expansion into new technologies was another important highlight of our year at Agiledrop. Laravel became a core technology in 2024, and we became both Laravel Certified as well as a part of Laravel Partners.

The open source LMS Moodle is another important technology that’s gaining ground. We’ve established a long-term partnership with the local University of Ljubljana, helping them mainstream the management and maintenance of Moodle installations with MooPanel, which is going to be open sourced. We also released a FAQ module, and we plan on contributing even more to Moodle and other OS projects this year.

It was also great to see our hiring return to pre-2023 levels. In 2024, we hired 13 new developers – 8 back end and 5 JavaScript developers – as well as more project managers to more easily support the work of our developers and facilitate collaboration with clients.

So, I’m very happy to say that we achieved the vast majority of the goals that we set for ourselves at the beginning of 2024, and even had a lot of new unexpected achievements that we didn’t plan. I’m proud of the entire Agiledrop team for always giving it their best; thank you for all your hard work and dedication!

Plans for 2025

All this hard work and effort from 2024 has given us a very strong foundation for 2025, and we have a lot of important things planned for this year.

A key priority for our development will be having more architects and team leads. We also plan on developing a project management practice, and streamline the onboarding program for new Laravel developers as well as for JavaScript developers, the latter focusing particularly on React & Next.js. In addition, we plan on exploring even more new technologies, such as the Typo3 CMS, in order to serve existing and new clients as best as possible.

While we’ve not implemented a return to office policy or anything like that, we do want more employees to come work in one of our offices more regularly. This was also one of the major reasons behind the renovation of our Ljubljana headquarters.

So, our approach will be to offer a better experience than the one they get working from home; namely, we plan on further improving engagement through more frequent TechTalks and other events, and doing soft skills training to promote career development.

Our sales & marketing are getting a refresh this year as well. One of our main priorities will be to build a portfolio of references and case studies, something that we already started working on in 2024.

We also need to just generally optimize the alignment between our sales and marketing. One of the key new initiatives that we’re planning is launching a new podcast that will be more focused on the specific challenges and needs of our (potential) clients rather than our highly successful but much broader Agile Digital Transformation podcast.

Apart from that, we’re focusing more on LinkedIn this year over other social media platforms. You can expect to see me post more often. :)

We plan to build a better reputation within the Laravel community, and start building awareness and contributing more to other open source communities such as Moodle; the main goal here is to become a Moodle Partner in 2025.

Final words

I need to once again thank each and every member of the Agiledrop team for their unwavering dedication to their work which has allowed us to consistently deliver the top quality services to our clients. Thank you as well to all our clients, readers, podcast guests and listeners for being a part of our story in 2024.