Looking Back at 2020
Looking at our phones it’s good to see all the apps we’ve developed so far 🙂
Introduction
Does anyone want to look back at 2020? Yes, we actually do. It's been nothing short of a challenge for everyone but despite the surprises, not all quite pleasant, we can say we had a pretty good year. From grants to new projects, to new colleagues, to blogposts to... we made it happen!
Projects ✍🏼
Working on projects that inspire you in such a way that you decide to pursue that area is exactly what we've been aiming for. One such inspiration was working on Relaynet, a computer network designed to resist internet blackouts. If you want to learn more about this project you can read our blogpost.
We've also continued with RBC Medical Billing, our longest client. We're providing our technical expertise on their Dr. Bill app, a useful medical billing app for Canadian doctors, while their team and market share continues to grow.
Soon we'll have news of another project we're wrapping up. It's a popular app we've been porting to Android during this year, one we're sure you would love to try out. 🎙
We've also updated two of our apps. Inspired by the positive app reviews, we decided to update Large Text, by making it more accessible. We've been meaning to explore the accessibility component of our apps and this was the perfect excuse.
Envelop is an app we've designed and developed on the Blockstack platform, which is focused on digital rights and also open source. Blockstack updated their system to be more intuitive for new users and we decided to improve Envelop's authentication flow with Connect.
Last but certainly not least is our Stacks Grant. The Stacks Open Internet Foundation launched a grant program. Because our Android app, Envelop, was built on Blockstack, we decided to apply and make the Android experience ever better. We proposed to build an official native Blockstack Auth app and our grant was approved! 🎉 You can follow the progress on our project repository.
2020 was also the year in which we made an active effort to focus our BizDev contacting Human Rights associations with whom we might partner with. Drop us a line if you're looking for a studio to create your Android app.
Technical Contributions 🤝
Tech communities grow and prosper on the input they get from developers. That’s why we continue contributing to the Android development community. And, in the process, we keep learning new things.
Here’s how we contributed last year:
We revised our Android Starter Template. Our loyal followers may remember this project from 4 years ago. It’s a template to start developing a new Android app. We updated it to ensure it’s up-to-date with the latest best practices. We're happy to say that 133 developers have stared our project on Github and 35 did their own fork.
Developing an open source application comes with its own challenges. For others to understand it and contribute to it, some best practices should be followed. Drawing from our own experience, we wrote Open Source App Development, a blogpost where we share our strategies.
Doubling our team 👨👨👧👧
We celebrated 5 years, last year. As our studio grew, so did our team and eventually the need for an extra pair of hands.
Germana joined us in July, she's our Operations Manager. We also started looking for a Junior Android Developer and soon enough we had a perfect match, we found Filipe.
Suddenly the team doubled in size! The dynamics changed completely and we were quite excited with the new team.
Socialising brings infinite benefits to any workplace and we, at Bloco, take that very seriously 😇 That's why we miss playing Jenga after lunch, or knitting, or visiting art galleries, or having picnics at the local park. It's about being active in our community and helping local artists, chefs, shopkeepers and roasted chestnut sellers matters to us.
Side Projects 👀
Jantarada came up during last year's lockdown, a time where local businesses were very vulnerable. We joined our friend João Gonçalves and decided to support our local restaurants by creating Jantarada. This app lists about 140 restaurant from which you can easily order your food to go! With this we aimed to help local restaurants make ends meet during this critical period.
Events 🗣
One of our favorite parts! (did we mention we like socializing?)
Belonging to a like-minded community of people is a great way to meet interesting people and share ideas.
Unfortunately and thanks to a certain virus we weren't able to organize as many events as we would love to. We were, however, able to hold a virtual edition: The Zain Talk #12. In this session we talked about remote work experiences. 💻 We invited Ana Ferreira from Doist and Pedro Silva from Gitlab, both of them have been working with remote teams for a long time, and they had a lot of useful information to teach us about the subject. Some of the topics that we discussed:
Communication with coworkers;
Team/personal management;
Productivity and focus — How to handle all this during the tough times we're living.
The conversation was guided by Maria Margarida who is a product designer at Trouva.
Hopefully 2021 will give us the privilege to organize more events, like we used to.
Readings📗
The benefits of reading are infinite and so having a library at the studio sounded like a good idea. Not only fosters knowledge sharing and collaborating but it also sparks creativity and inspires us to engage with each other. Not to mention the excuse to get away from screens and explore new and different topics. So here are some titles that might inspire you:
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin
The Ethical Design Handbook - Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen, Kim Andersen
⭐️ Despite all the ups and downs 2020 was a year to be grateful for. Now it's time to look ahead with the certainty that 2021 will give us the opportunities to continue to grow!
Happy 2021 and thanks for being part of this!