2017, year in review

2017 is one of those very special years for us at SilverStripers. There were many exciting things happening around this year and these are the few we thought we'd share.

New booking software

Following Nivanka's New Zealand visit last year and a new partnership with Toast, a web design agency in Auckland we started working on a travel company product for Stray Travel. We became fully responsible in managing their booking software and rolled out a complete re-write for their booking system with SilverStripe 4. Stray Travel is a tour operator offering HOP-ON HOP-OFF bus passes in New Zealand and Asia. We re-engineered their booking software and built a complete solution to work with ZAUI,a booking system's provider. The system we build handles the connections between ZAUI and allow Stray users to book and manage their passes in a single interface. We were responsible in doing a complete data migration from the old Code Ignitor platform they had. 

The SilverStripers Tower

In March, we laid the first stone for a new building project, a 4 storied building in one of the main suburbs of Colombo. The project has been super exciting with all the planning and a total new experience in the building industry. 

To date we've been doing really well with it and have completed building the main structure up of the building. We are looking to move in to this fresh building in the first quarter of 2018, which will be another amazing milestone for us. Also we are looking at sharing it with other software development agencies once it is completed and any queries are welcome. 

Pramesh got graduated

Pramesh joined us early 2016 and has worked with us as an intern for 6 months last year. He had to go back to the university to complete his bachelor of science degree in Information Technology. He joined us full time after another 6 months at the university, and got graduated in October 2016 from the university of Moratuwa. We are so proud to have him in the team and now he is responsible in handling one of our major client. 

We always welcome internships from various universities. And this year we've got Sanduni, from the university of Sabaragamuwa working with us as an intern designer / front end developer.

Marking our name in open source

In the past we've shared code, modules with the SilverStripe community. But we never had actual time in managing or supporting them. This time we made a breakthrough with identifying the responsibilities of managing an open source module. Amazingly the first module we published, a Markdown Editor for SilverStripe got featured in the SilverStripe blog as the module of the month. 

Following that we contributed to a lot of other modules with some amazing help from our client TimeZoneOne. These modules includes 

• SilverStripe Linkable 
• Display Logic 
• Google map field

To mark the end of the year we published another new module which enables SEO data editing much easier.

SilverStripe 4

Its not news anymore, that SilverStripe 4 has been released. We believe that SilverStripe is a game changer in many areas. Its been one of those things we've been waiting for long. A much faster, well engineered framework which utilizes the power of the latest web development trends like ReactJS, GraphQL, Bootstrap.

Whats next for 2018

With all these and many other things took place in 2017, we are looking forward for an amazing year ahead. We've made new partnerships with web agencies and more focused in developing booking systems for tour operators. Our goal is to produce a ReactJS based single page booking application to place bookings and manage passes. We are looking forward to harness the power of GraphQL and SilverStripe 4 in achieving this. 

Open source attracts more focus as well and we will be continuously supporting the community with our contributions and we've got a few more modules we believe that will be very useful. 

Also like I mentioned above we are very excited in moving on to our brand new office space, in the first quarter of 2018.

With all these we close 2017 with a high note, and thanks for all our amazing clients for being with us. Also making this an opportunity to  wish you all a very merry Christmas and a winning new year.