Looking back on 2021:a more hopeful year

Looking back on 2021: a more hopeful year

Every year at Commencis, we go back to the beginning and connect the dots to reveal a picture of a successful roadmap for the years to come. In 2021, we have experienced the continuing effects of the pandemic and we normalized the reality where our interactions are almost completely online. Yet we managed to create joyful moments together.

We started the year with the news of the raid on the US Capitol on January 6th. A crowd of former President Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on the day the results of the presidential election, in which President Joe Biden was victorious, were confirmed. The following month, on February 16, Daft Punk announced its decision to break up after 28 years, deeply upsetting all the fans. We watched with sadness the losses caused by the forest fires that broke out in Turkey and many other countries in August and couldn’t be extinguished for a long time.

Of course, we also encountered events that gave hope to the whole world: after the vaccination of a 90-year-old woman in England for the first-time last December, in Turkey it was started to be applied to healthcare workers for the first time in January. And that marked the date where we slowly started to break free from the long-lasting quarantine. Towards the end of the year, we had good news on the development of antiviral COVID-19 pill that reduces the risk of hospitalization and death by 89% percent.

On September 15, SpaceX was successfully sent to Earth orbit, while on October 28, Facebook expanded our virtual spaces further under the name Meta which remarked the beginning of a new virtual period.

Finally, on November 23, Covid-19 hasn’t let us down and we heard about the new variant Omicron. The increasing inflation trend all over the world, continued to surprise us in the last months of the year.

Despite ups and downs, we choose to see opportunities and start the new year more hopeful.

Let’s take a look at the year of Commencis:

The new way of working: Summer Campus

Remote working, which we learned with great lessons last year showed that nothing will be the same again with the flexible working decisions made by companies.

As Commencis, we continued to support our team for a good work-life balance and have moved our working environment to a holiday village last summer with the Commencis Summer Campus. Commencis employees both worked remotely and spent time on vacation with their families and relatives at Hapimag Resort Sea Garden located in one of the most beautiful bays of Bodrum. Commencis interns were also able to attend the campus. The campus which was planned to last for 12 weeks was extended with the great interest of our team and 500 people attended the campus including families.
This opportunity brought a new dimension to remote working and had wide media coverage.

New content from Commencis experts

We continued to produce and share blog posts, insights and reports on on latest digital business solutions and technology trends.

A total of 14 reports we have published so far contain the most up-to-date information on developments and trends in the industry. Also, our employees continued to inform people in their fields, such as design, product and engineering with a total of 18 podcasts we have recorded so far.

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Events

We are now quite used to participating in events remotely and we have begun to experience the advantages of it. We participated in a total of 21 events and organized 3 Commencis events.

The Spring Term Commencis project course, organized jointly with the Computer Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University (ITU), was completed with 35 participants. The 14-week project course, which started on March 4, aimed to teach students about the latest technologies such as Flutter and React Native and their specific use in fintech.

14 interns successfully completed the Future Commencer Internship Program, which is a 6-week program we organize every summer to convey our team spirit to new graduates, which took place between 6 July and 3 September.

Commencis Test Camp, held between 12 October and 16 November. 22 applicants successfully completed the 24-hour training program during 6-week training. The program was designed by our QA team to provide basic software testing training to university students interested in this field.

Our traditional Commencis CloudCamp, will be held for the third time next year and applications are open. The 6-week program, which will be held between January 25 and March 3 in 2022, will prepare university students to learn the most demanded cloud computing skills. They will also have the chance to qualify for an industry-leading AWS certification and start building their cloud careers.

In addition to the events we have hosted here are other key events we attended last year:

Commencis, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Tech Data – Freedom of Licensing
WiDS Istanbul 2021 Conference
METU Career Fair
METU Business Community Entrepreneurship and Technology Summit
ITU Career Summit 2021
“Improve Your Cloud Costs with Optimization” in collaboration with IDC & Google-Commencis
Webrazzi Digital 2021
Webrazzi Developer 2021
Bilkent CS Fair
Bilkent University- Design your Career
Eskişehir Technical University – Entrepreneurship and Development Summit
ITU Computer Engineering Project Course
JA Startup 2021
ITU ACM Bootcamp
EurAsia Proptech Initiative Meet-Up Co-organized with ULI and GYODER
“Creating Value from Data” DigitalTalks Autumn’21 conference
AWS Technology Week

New Awards

As every year, we believed in the power of cooperation and win-win strategy. We continued to earn new awards and competencies.

Thanks to our Cloud team, we achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency status . And we have been named as AWS DevOps Consulting Partner of the Year in Turkey. AWS DevOps Consulting Partners offer a range of services and technology solutions to simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, monitoring application and infrastructure performance to accelerate time to market, and optimizing each stage of the software development lifecycle. Once again congrats to our Cloud team!

Kept our Environmental Focus

This year, fires and flood disasters took our environmental awareness to higher levels, which had already increased with the pandemic. As Commencis, we continued to support and do our best in every way for a better planet.

Due to the destruction caused by humans, climate change and recent forest fires, the biological diversity of species in our country is gradually decreasing. We think that it’s extremely valuable and important to take inventory of all species of Anatolia, especially endangered species, to transfer them to future generations. For this reason, we were delighted to sponsor Turkey’s most comprehensive habitat documentary ‘Anatolia Ancient Nature‘ , brought to life by Burak Doğansoysal and his team.

The Anatolia Ancient Nature documentary, which is planned to be shot for approximately 2.5 years, aims to create a visual inventory of the Anatolian geography, which contains extremely important species for the world’s natural heritage. After the forest fires, which took place shortly after we started shooting the documentary and which deeply saddened us all, the documentary team photographed the young shoots in the forests destroyed by the fires in cooperation with Commencis. Seeing nature repair itself in these photographs gave us hope for the future. We will continue our efforts for a better planet in 2022 and beyond.

Key Takeaways from the Year

Online meetings and enhanced virtuality are now becoming the realities of our new lives. In fact, as a company, we have seen that we are already very used to this way of working. We can take our precautions very quickly and show enough flexibility for changes in a timely manner. No matter how resistant we are to the changes, the biggest truth of history is that everything changes every moment.

Agendas related to vaccine equality and hybrid working have now started to become clear in our minds. By the end of the year, our worries about how we will deal with the pandemic are a little less. We think that 2022 promises a year where the new normal is just our normal for most of us. Thank you for accompanying us throughout the year. We look forward to seeing future innovations and experiencing them all together. Happy new year to all!