2017 was Eziline's tenth year and the year the paperwork caught up with the business. The company was registered with the SECP as Eziline Software House (Pvt) Ltd in October, an international entity was incorporated in the United Kingdom the same month, the website went fully SSL in March, and in December the Rawalpindi office was re-inaugurated after a refit. Each of these has its own post on this site.
Becoming a company on paper
Incorporation in Pakistan and the UK was about the clients we were now serving. Overseas customers wanted a registered counterpart, and public-sector and larger private clients at home wanted a private limited company on the contract. It also made the later memberships of P@SHA and the Rawalpindi Chamber of Commerce possible.
Campus and community
The team attended open houses and job fairs at Foundation University (FURC) in August and COMSATS in December, meeting final-year students and hiring from both. University relationships became a regular part of the calendar from here on, and the MoUs that followed in later years grew out of these visits.
The technology of 2017
Google announced Kotlin as an official Android language at I/O in May, and the Android team started moving new work to it. Flutter appeared in alpha the same month; we watched it closely as a possible single codebase for both stores and would adopt it once it stabilised. On the web, React and Vue were maturing alongside Angular, and our front-end choices became per-project rather than one framework for everything.
- SECP incorporation in Pakistan and company registration in the UK.
- HTTPS everywhere, starting with our own site.
- Office re-inauguration in December with the whole team.
- Kotlin for Android, Flutter on the watch list.
Looking ahead
Ten years in, the company had legal structure, a refitted office, secure infrastructure and a product line. 2018 was planned as the year to be seen. Applications went in for membership of P@SHA, the industry association, and the Rawalpindi Chamber of Commerce; stand bookings were made for Gitex in Dubai and ITCN Asia in Karachi; and the anniversary in November was to be celebrated properly. The university visits of 2017 would be repeated and extended. On the technology side, GDPR was coming into force in May 2018 and every hosted system with European users needed reviewing. The mobile team expected to ship its first Kotlin apps and to start a real Flutter project once the framework reached beta. And the first practical machine-learning features, recommendations and classification inside existing systems, were being scoped for clients who had the data to make them useful.
