With the beginning of 2019, comes the 2018 summary. So for Pantographe, 2018 started with a move to Nantes. We settled at the Karting, eco-friendly simple offices for creative businesses. A great place to start our adventure.

About our team

This year we also started to team up with Baptiste, an iOS and backend developer who moved in Nantes to work at Pantographe office. Lucas also joined us, as a frontend developer. He’s working remotely with us, from the beloved Amsterdam.
As the team started to grow, we had to implement a real work process.

Our processes

We’ll not take too long on this, but 2018 was the year we build our process to work as a team.
We started to use some new tools as ActiveCollab to improve our project management.
For the development part we used GitLab from the beginning but now we do code review, continuous integration and continuous deployment. That let us be focus on our development and have more check on our code before it may be published.
We also worked on hosting part, we are now using dokku to manage our staging environment that we offer to our customers.
And to finish we worked with a lawyer to create a maintenance contract and be able to propose this to our customers.

What did we work on?

GrandNumero

2018 for Pantographe was also the year of the opening of Grand Numero, a project started early summer 2017. It’s a website where influencers can help you to find the best hotels all over the world ; when you find your dreaming one, you can easily book it.

For Grand Numero we worked on the backend of it. We built a RESTful API, with Ruby on Rails. And we work with frontend developers from Grand Numero.
It was our first project to improve our process and work as a team.

cultcheers

During this year, we also started to work with cultcheers, a french company, based in Amsterdam. cultcheers is the contraction of the words ‘culture’ and ‘cheers’, meaning ‘enjoying culture in a friendly atmosphere’. This format offers you one hour of culture close to home or directly at your place, on the topic of your choice, over a drink in a small group of people.

On this project, we do both backend and frontend development, in Ruby on Rails, of course. We also improve our process with this new project. It was also the project on which we did the frontend part. We build our way to use GitLab and start to do code review.
The website was opened during the last trimester of 2018. We’re still working on it, and we have a lot of functionalities to add. So 2019, should be a busy year for this project.

What about 2019?

At the end of 2018 we also thought about hosting. We would like to be able to host the projects we work on.
Creating websites and web applications is something we really enjoy to do. But since we are only working with Rails, we cannot easily let our customers manage the hosting of their application themselves. That way in this new year we’ll continue to study this and try to propose a hosting offer.
We’ll also work to improve our acceptance testing process to have exchange easily with our customers during this phase. If we don’t find a tool we like, we’ll plan to create our own.

So a lot of exciting stuff is coming this year. We can’t wait. But for now, all we have to do is to wish you a great year 2019!