It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

The Olamalu Christmas tree is up in the office. Last minute Christmas shopping is being discussed, and there is that lovely feeling of excitement beginning to bubble.


Looking back at 2014, we’ve had a year of growth, change and challenges.
 
Our team has grown considerably - there are now 8 ‘Olamaluans’, and our newest recruits have slotted in beautifully. We are as only as strong as our team, so training, nurturing, listening and growing together are a key part of our yearly business plan. We finish the year with a much broader technical skill set – we can undertake object oriented programming and are able to work in programming languages including PHP, Ruby and Java. We are also working with application technologies such as Node JS and Angular JS and are experts in foundation platform for responsive sites.
 
A bigger team required a change in premises, so we moved offices this year too and are now settled nicely into our new Olamalu HQ.
 
Every year brings new challenges for a business, and ours has been in moving our clients onto responsive websites. The phenomenal growth in ‘on the move browsing’ via tablets, phones and other mobile devices means that websites need to be able to adapt to the device that's being used to browse. A responsive website will shrink, stretch and re-arrange itself to look its very best for your customer to easily navigate around. We’ve risen to the challenge in adopting new technology to programme the websites we build and have held our customers' hands in adapting their existing websites to meet the new demands of the internet.
 
Working closely with our clients is important to us. So this year we implemented Git development processes, strengthening our version control and enabling us to work with in-house development teams.
 
Now back to Christmas! We are fascinated by the traditions and rituals adopted by different families, so we asked some of our multi-national team for an insight into their Christmases - here’s what we found:
 
Christoph
Christoph's mum always insisted on having lit candles on the Xmas tree in keeping with the Germanic tradition. Beautiful to look at, but very much a fire hazard, so carol singing around the tree always takes place with a fire extinguisher in hand!
 
Erika
In Hungary, Erika tells us that they decorate the tree on Christmas Eve full of excitement, ready for the celebratory dinner of fish that evening.
 
Leonidas
On New Year's Day in Greece, Leonidas looks forward to the traditional pie which has a coin hidden inside - this brings good luck for the new year.

At Olamalu HQ, we always get a mini Xmas tree made especially for us by Nikki Budd of Budds Floral. She decorates it beautifully in our Olamalu brand colours, and it sits pride of place in our office.
 
We like to celebrate together with a team Christmas lunch catered for us by local company Tilia. They use fresh, locally sourced ingredients, and the food is always delicious. The highlights this year were honey-baked ham and chocolate profiteroles.
 
We hope that your year has been positive and that you have a peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year.
 
 
Warm wishes
Team Olamalu
 

December 2014