If one year on this site is over-represented, it is 2018, and for good reason. Eziline joined P@SHA and the Rawalpindi Chamber of Commerce in August, exhibited at Gitex Technology Week in Dubai, the China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen and ITCN Asia in Karachi, celebrated its 11th anniversary in November, and sent the team on tours to Murree, Jabri, Neelum Valley and Deosai. The about page marks 2018 as "mobile apps on both stores", and that was the year it became routine.
Exhibitions and memberships
Gitex 2018 was the company's first big international stand, and the enquiries it generated shaped the next two years of overseas work. The China Hi-Tech Fair and ITCN Asia followed. At home, membership of P@SHA (the Pakistan Software Houses Association) and RCCI put Eziline inside the industry conversation: the P@SHA CEO meetup on the government's digital policy, the PSEB industry feedback session and an open-banking session with Paul Rohan are all written up here.
Mobile on both stores
With Kotlin on Android, Swift on iOS and the first Flutter beta releases through 2018, shipping an app to both stores became a standard deliverable rather than two separate projects. Several client systems that had started as web dashboards got companion apps for field staff and customers that year.
GDPR and AI
GDPR came into force in May and affected every client with European users. We reviewed data handling across the systems we host, added consent and export features, and started treating privacy as a design input. Meanwhile machine learning moved from research into product features; our first practical AI work, recommendations and document classification inside existing systems, dates from this period.
Team life
- Tours: Murree in February, Jabri in April, Neelum Valley in May, Deosai in September.
- A BBQ at Daman-e-Koh, Eid celebrations and a staff plantation drive in October.
- Open houses at Iqra University, FURC and Bahria University, and the USAID SMEA programme.
- The 11th anniversary celebration in November, with the whole company.
Looking ahead
The exhibitions had worked, and the plan for 2019 followed from them: meet the European enquiries in person. A trip around the Pakistan Tech Summit in Oslo was pencilled in, with visits to partners and clients in Sweden, Estonia, Germany and France. At home the company intended to stay involved with P@SHA, Startup Grind and the universities that had become its main source of graduates. Technically, Flutter 1.0 shipped in December 2018 and the mobile team planned to make it the default for new cross-platform apps; the serverless pattern was to be tried for the bursty parts of client systems; and 360° photography equipment was bought for the property and hospitality clients asking for virtual tours. The team tours, which had become the most popular tradition in the company, were going to continue with Swat and the northern areas.
