Google introduced Material Design at I/O in June 2014 and Docker reached version 1.0 the same month. One changed how our apps looked; the other changed how they were built and deployed. Both were adopted at Eziline within the year.
A design language for apps
Material gave the Android work a coherent system: cards, elevation, motion with purpose, a typographic scale. We applied it to the mobile apps first and then to web dashboards, where its card-based layouts suited data-heavy screens. For the design team it meant fewer arguments about pixels and more time on flows.
Containers end "works on my machine"
Docker solved a problem every growing team has. Developers on different machines, staging servers set up by hand, and production environments that drifted from both. Packaging each application with its PHP version, extensions and services into containers made environments reproducible, and made it realistic to run several client systems on shared infrastructure without them interfering. Deployment became a script rather than a checklist.
The year in projects
- Business management systems for trading and distribution clients, with stock, sales and accounts in one place, the direct ancestors of our ERP line.
- Android and iOS apps for clients whose customers were now mostly on phones.
- WordPress and custom CMS work continued for organisations that needed content more than workflow.
The team passed another growth milestone in 2014 and the office was rearranged more than once to fit everyone. With the development process now standardised from framework to deployment, the company was ready for the product work that defined the next two years.
Looking ahead
Everything in 2014 pointed at products. The business management systems were converging, the deployment pipeline could now run many similar systems cheaply, and clients were asking for shorter timelines than a from-scratch build could deliver. The plan for 2015 was to pick the three systems with the most demand, business ERP, retail point-of-sale and hospital management, and build a configurable core for each, with the specifics done as customisation on top. It meant a different kind of engineering: feature flags, multi-client databases, upgrade paths and documentation, which custom projects had never needed. The mobile team would keep growing on the back of Material Design and the first wave of app-first clients. And the internship programme would get a formal completion ceremony, with certificates and a few job offers, as a way of recognising a pipeline that was now producing a good share of the company's hires.
