Our blog posts from November 2019

The year has come to a close - and what a year it has been! For Agiledrop as well as for Drupal, it has truly been an amazing and successful one - and yet, we feel it is only a prelude to all that’s coming in 2020. To properly end the year, here’s a recap of all our posts from last month - enjoy!

International Splash Awards: A celebration of Drupal innovation

Following DrupalCon Amsterdam and the concurrent Splash Awards, which we sponsored, our first blog post in November was aimed at promoting the event and congratulating and showcasing some of the winners. 

For Ronald van Rooijen, Managing Partner at FRMWRK that won the award in the Government and Public Services category, the award is a testament to the successful collaboration between their and SIM’s team, as they were able to quickly replace their existing system (used for over 10 years) with Drupal. 

Daniël Smidt, the CTO at Synetic that won in the Tools & Apps category with their DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, was happy that their work not only provided obvious benefits to their clients in terms of user experience, but that it also meant a significant contribution to Drupal.

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Interview with Alex Moreno López: Materialize your digital dreams with Drupal

Next up, we had one of our Drupal Community Interviews - this one with the friendly Alex Moreno López, Acquia’s Technical Architect. We talked about his beginnings with Drupal and open source, his greatest inspirations and interests in tech, and much more. 

Alex gauged the potential of Drupal early on, already with Drupal 4 / 5, and saw it as having an advantage over the easier to use WordPress. As he brilliantly describes it, “Drupal is a tool that allows you to materialize your digital Dreams in a way that you don’t necessarily need coding knowledge.”

He is excited about a lot of things in tech and open source, both the technologies and the community (the people, speaking at events, etc). He wishes a day had 40 hours, so he’d be able to squeeze in more learning and contributing each day.

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How development agencies can attract & retain clients

Our third post from November was more business-oriented and was aimed at development agencies struggling with properly positioning themselves and hence winning over long-term clients.

In this post, we outlined five proven approaches to attracting and retaining clients. These are: 

1. Prioritizing the employee experience
2. Dedicating time to learning
3. Becoming a partner in the true sense of the word
4. Aligning with the client’s in-house team
5. Be transparent from the get-go

As we see, these can mostly be distilled to, on the one hand, understanding the needs and wishes of your employees, and, on the other, communicating well with the clients. The most important thing is to always take into account the human aspect in these relationships.

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A month in the life of an Agiledrop developer

With our last post written in November, we wanted to provide our readers some insight into what a typical month looks like for an Agiledrop developer - their daily and weekly tasks, internal events and meetups, and just the general vibe in all of our offices.

Since we want only the best for both employees and clients, we hold regular meetings to keep each other up-to-date on all current projects and vacations, and we also make use of these meetings to recognize and congratulate our employees for a job well done. 

We also hold a host of activities, ranging from internal ones, such as our AgileSport and AgileFood, to broader developer community events (e.g. open-source meetups). In order to facilitate collaboration and knowledge-sharing, we work predominantly in the offices, while still maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

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Happy holidays to all our readers - we hope to see you all again in 2020!