percipio.london: 2020 A year in review

Like most other folks, we had a strategy for 2020. We were going to launch our new evidence-based API service; we were going to have an Alpine staff HACKATHON and celebrate our successes.

2020 told us that we needed to pivot.

We started the year working towards client-focused goals, updating our software build system, writing job descriptions, planning our summer #hackathon and mostly looking forward to starting a new decade. A few weeks in and it was clear 2020 had something else in store. As the world panicked, lots of indecisions began to trickle down from our clients. We hit the pause button on our recruitment drive and API software launch and spent some time on pause.

We’re a complete decade into working remotely full time; watching the pandemic starting to unfold we quickly realised that we were soon to have many more companies join our ranks. Seeing the nation starting to scramble, we produced a covid readiness report for our clients. We wanted to ensure that we were here to stay in our comfort zone, fully versed in remote operations and ready with increased capacity to help out with web application development and resource report creation.

In the end, we were fortunate that 2020 was kind to our business. As you will have undoubtedly noticed, our industry and the sectors we operate in are in a good place when the world becomes increasingly reliant on the web. Our revenue grew 20% over the last year, which enabled us to kickstart our planned recruitment drive and bring on four new staff members at a time when global redundancies were at their highest.

Delivered the National Tutoring Programme web application

As part of the UK Governments £1billion Covid Catch up Plan, the NTP was introduced to ensure pupils most affected by the pandemic can catch up. As with most of the changing landscapes of the year, speed was paramount. Under the scrutiny of the national media failure was not an option (hello track and trace app). Pulling a few all-nighters and working through the weekends, we built and delivered this web application in just under 14 days to an audience of over 150k users. Take a look at the case study if you want to find out more!

Built a geographic schools API

We built a RESTful API that ties in the national postcode database with the UK schools database so that we’re able to quickly return regional school information for our education-based applications. This is now fully integrated with our client’s web applications and currently delivers >40,000 requests per day.

Expanded the team

Our team increased in size from 5 to 9 people.

• Stefanie joined us from Belgium as a front end developer and is also chipping away at plugin development.
• Stuart joined us from London as a UI/UX designer.
• Carly joined us from Birmingham to expand our graphic design/​animation team.
• Dave, from Australia, became our first junior hire. Successfully honed his skills over 6 months before moving into a developer role for a global communication company.

Added a touch of colour

Percipio is nigh on 10 years old and our old skeuomorphic Penrose step inspired P was looking (according to Stuart at least) rather drab and dreary. With the launch of our API provisioning service, metaseed, only a few short months away, we took the opportunity to give it a more simple, colourful image that better sits with the direction we are headed.

We’ve moved away from a fixed colour palette into a colour agnostic brand – who needs 3 colours when you can have an entire palette?!

Added 3 plugins into the Craft plugin store

Innovation is part of our core work, and we build plugins for our clients weekly. We’re going to be doing a lot more of that in 2021 so have started to release a few of them into the Craft plugin store, to date our plugins are already in use on over 3,000 active web applications around the world – watch this space for a host of new Percipio plugins later this year.