2021: Ten Forward's Year in Review

Whew - 2021 flew by in the blink of an eye! It sure has been a busy year here at Ten Forward; we finally finished setting up our new office, spoke at several in-person and virtual events, and in-between pandemic outbreaks, we got to work together in-person for the first time in a long time. 

Read on for some of Ten Forward's highlights from 2021! 

Crew News

Hellos 

We had two new additions to our crew this year. Welcome to Isabel and Abby! 

With our new additions, Ten Forward is now 67% women, but has dropped to 17% people of color, from a high of 33% people of color last year. We are committed to improving our diversity and inclusivity as we grow our team in 2022. 

P.S. We're hiring!

Goodbyes

We said farewell to several crew members this year, and while we're sad to see them go, we're excited for their new adventures living closer to family and working at dream jobs in new states.

We're especially proud of our 2021 apprentice, Elaheh, who graduated from UW-Madison and recently started her first full-time programming job!

How We've Shared 

Volunteering

In 2021, Ten Forward sponsored 41 workday hours for our team to volunteer in the Madison community, both in-person and virtually.  Here are some of the organizations with whom we volunteered:

• YWCA: YWeb Career Academy 
• Urban Triage
• Madison Women in Tech
• Social Good Accelerator
• Forward Fest 
• Maydm

Speaking

Here at Ten Forward, we believe that knowledge and experiences should be shared. This year we spoke at a variety of conferences and guested on podcasts. Check them out: 

Connectacha 2021

"How I got out of my own way and found the happy path in tech" 

Madison Nonprofit Day 2021

"10 Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Tech"

Middleton Chamber of Commerce

"Straightforward strategies for making informed business decisions about software"

THAT Conference 2021 

"What I learned my first year as a full-time programmer" 

RubyConf 2021

"Why we worry about all the wrong things" 

Writing

We have also shared on our blog. Here were our top 5 most popular blog posts from the last year: 

1. So you want to embed a prototype into your website 
2. Rails Regex: Validate length of a number with or without a hyphen
3. Subclassing UIHostingcontroller to bridge the SwiftUI 1 to SwiftUI 2 divide
4. Integrating an array column with Simple Form in Rails
5. How to add a copy to clipboard button to your website

Here are some of our favorites:

• A round-up of networking questions for every level of social energy
• Ten Forward co-owner shared her journey to tech at Connectaha 2021
• Green flags when searching for a job
• Subclassing UIHostingcontroller to bridge the SwiftUI 1 to SwiftUI 2 divide

Software and Projects

New Client Spotlight

Over the summer, we added WIDA PRIME  (PRIME) to The Bridge, our custom website platform. PRIME is a tool to aid publishers and educators in analyzing materials for the key components of WIDA standards.

For this project, WIDA's big goal was to make it easy for visitors to find the specific materials they wanted, out of a long list of options. We worked with them to design and build an easy-to-use online library with multiple filters and a search bar; check it out here! 

Fun Statistics

Pull requests merged: 

751

Push notifications processed by our software product Cloudfive: 

73,943,520 

Ten Forward blog: 

13,539 unique page views from 140 countries