2020 wasn’t a year we would all like to remember that much. Although our team did not have that many opportunities to work in person, I think we did a lot of great work. Let me explain what we are dealing with: We are a team of roughly three DevOps engineers with the fourth honourable member, our team leader. All the non-honourable members are part of the support rotation. That means a week in a month you have to be available for developers if they are in trouble. We also have 24×7 on-call duty for one project. It sounds like something that is more & less the SRE team’s responsibility, and under normal circumstances in a larger company, you would be right. Somehow, we had to find a way to make everything work with our DevOps duties. (more…)

IX. Report on the State of Ackee in 2020
Getting into Ackee is harder than getting into Harvard
This year has been very challenging without any doubt. In Ackee, we were quite lucky and the year went well despite the pandemic. We reached an ambitious goal: turnover of 100 million CZK which constitutes growth by 25 % compared to last year. In doing so, we still managed to keep our margin above the usual agency average of 20 %. For our clients, we launched projects with global ambitions FlashSport and FlashNews, a video library for millions of viewers of the CME group or a beautiful and useful application for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). We volunteered on the platform Covid19CZ, we are finishing up applications for the 3rd medical faculty of Charles University for faster and more accurate decision making for doctors when working with patients with critical conditions, we supported several Czech and one German non-profit project. None of that would have been possible without a carefully selected team that has grown once again this year.

Ackee Among the Best B2B IT Agencies in the World
In Ackee, we focus on the maximum quality of the delivered solution already since 2012. Our technological knowhow, professional attitude, timely deliveries and gentlemen’s agreements is appreciated by customers such as ŠKODA AUTO DigiLab, German Bundestag or Livesport. We mostly take part in the projects from the beginning discovery phase through user research, UX and UI design, copy, testing to the creation of the final product. During the app development, the team is working under the direction of an experienced technical project manager. We have been working together for a long time, so we are in sync. That is a major advantage, because we can look after the quality in all parts of the project and guarantee that the customer is always satisfied. (more…)

How to Publish Applications Into Huawei AppGallery
Applications for operation system Android are most often distributed through Google Play Store which probably every user of some Android device knows. Even though Play Store is by far the most common app store with the widest range of applications, it is not the only one. Phones and tablets from Samsung include Galaxy Store, Amazon is running its Appstore, for the enthusiasts of open-source technologies, there is F-Droid and there are also other app stores. Lately, more and more applications are being distributed via the Huawei AppGallery which we got acquainted with recently in Ackee. (more…)

Six Things to Consider Once You Start Thinking about GCP vs. AWS
Yes, here we go again: listings of ten characteristics, advantages or attributes, yadda, yadda, yadda. Even I am not a fan of these types of articles. I have recently been transferred from one company to another and as a result of it I had to switch almost all of my cloud work from AWS to GCP. I must say that it has been an exciting journey so far, so I decided to point out some things where these two platforms differ, and I hope that it might be useful to others. (more…)

Usability Testing: How We Are Testing Apps
During the creation of mobile and web apps, the biggest focus needs to be the user. Our product can be stunning, but if the user is unable to even register into it, it becomes useless. The critical phase of app development is therefore the so-called usability testing. In other words testing of how easy or difficult it is to use it. But do you know when to include it and whether to pick the fast or the slow alternative? (more…)

How to Save on App Development
Development and maintenance of information systems is a big expense. In Ackee, we focus on the whole process of application creation from its specification through the design and development to the testing. That is why we know that the road from the idea to a finished app in the store can be complicated, long and expensive. So how to make sure that your application does not cost too much? (more…)

Navigation in Multi-Module Project
Over the last few years Android Developers have established best practises for writing apps: clean architecture, usage of MVVM as primary architectural pattern.
The most discussed topic of 2019 was modularisation. While it brought us a lot of benefits, I’ve discovered some pitfalls, one of them being in-app navigation.

Our Web Frontend Tech-Stack
In this blog post, I present the technological stack we use at Ackee frontend team for building modern web applications. We have a few different stacks for concrete use cases, but almost all of them are derived from JAMstack architecture, which has gained popularity in recent years. (more…)

Deloitte Awarded Ackee in the International Competition Technology Fast 500 EMEA
Czech development agency Ackee was awarded in the prestigious ranking Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA which is mapping the fastest growing technological companies in the region of Europe, Africa and Middle East. (more…)