2023 NonStop…

Sumit M

Published in

nonstopio

9 min readDec 29, 2023

A compendium of yet another eventful year at an organically growing organization.

Navigating the Uncertain

2023 brought along some of the most uncertain times for us at NonStop. In the last year (2022) it seemed as if even the sky was not the limit. We were growing at an insane pace. Then came the global economic meltdown, and the situation (esp. in the West) was not very helpful for businesses like us. Many of the existing clients of NonStop ended up slashing their engineering budgets, and it impacted our overall yearly strategy.

However, uncertainty blooms opportunity; and that is precisely what happened as went through the year. A few new initiatives that happened thanks to the uncertain times are as follows 🙂

A new place we would call home

Amidst all the uncertainty in the world, we decided to make a new home for ourselves. A place where we could express ourselves as creative software engineers. Detailed journey is written here 📝

This space of ours is special for many reasons, one of which is the metaphors it stands for! A more in-depth story on the same here 😇

(Re)Birth of a CoE (Center of Excellence) — SentienceIQ

We decided (and finally committed) to invest in #AppliedAI as an Expertise.

We had made a lame attempt at integrating AI and related engineering expertise & services at NonStop io in early 2019, and (no surprises) it failed abysmally. In 2019 none of us were able to dedicate our efforts towards building an AI expertise at NonStop.

However, many things were different this year — The whole world had woken up to the possibility of an AI Dystopia/Utopia (depends on how you look at it and think about it 😅), in the form of — Generative AI. One thing became a certainty — The role of a Software Engineer was changing, and AI was going to play a crucial role in how we would evolve as a species 🤖

One thing led to another, and Dr. Niyati Chhaya joined the Board of Advisors at NonStop io. Having a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Maryland and having worked as a senior research scientist at Adobe Research for ~11 years, put her in a perfect spot to help NonStop io plan its Applied AI strategy.

Over the next 6-months, we sharpened our Applied AI skillset, built a competent team, and delivered many useful MVPs for our clients.

We are consciously calling ourselves the Applied AI guys since we know that real AI work is not something we are equipped to handle at this point in time, and we do not intend to add to the current AI misinformation noise 😬

We now can humbly boast of having one of the best Applied AI Engineering teams that can tackle #GenerativeAI and #PredictiveAI problem statements with rather ease 💪🏽

Shailesh killing it at the FlowGPT Hackathon 🤩

We also conducted an interesting Webinar on a topic very few product/service organizations seem to be focusing on while starting on their AI journey.

Continued excellence in software engineering services and deliveries

We had always envisioned NonStop io as a team of individuals who helped businesses elevate their technical edge, by crafting functioning, appealing, and scalable technology platforms.

For the 8 years in business, we had iteratively achieved this by continuously reinventing ourselves technically. We had started with Native Android and iOS, and through the years became adept in many more things. Our current technology stack looks quite promising and assuring 😇

Engineering Tech Stack @ NonStop io — 2023

At NonStop, as software engineers, we are committed to unlearning things that do not make sense in the ever-changing technological canvas (eg: avoiding coding repetitive things in software development by automating them), relearning a few things such as the core fundamentals of Computer Science which will almost certainly exist till the end of humanity and probably even beyond(!), and then attempting to learn everything new that the technology world has to offer (including the experimentation with the new-age low-code-no-code platforms etc.)

Throughout the year, various leads at NonStop focused on delivering high-quality and timely deliveries to the various businesses we were serving. These efforts at times received direct appreciation from our clients; and every time this happened as a founder, I was filled with a sense of pride and fulfillment 😇

Internally at NonStop, our monthly StarOfTheMonth program continued with all the pomp through 2023 as well. One of the philosophies at NonStop is that whatever success we end up achieving as an organization is not possible without the contributions (and at times sacrifices) of the family members. Hence, every month at NonStop we try to identify one person who went beyond their call of duty as our “Star Of The Month”. We founders, then request this individual’s family for lunch/dinner with us to personally thank them for their contributions to making NonStop the organization it is, and acknowledge that they are the real stars in all of this circus ⭐️

NonStop — Drink from the well, replenish the well…

Workshops — Talks — Webinars

Through 2023 NonStop became a go-to place in Pune for hosting technology workshops, talks, webinars, and podcasts. We successfully hosted workshops, talks, and webinars in Flutter, React, and Applied AI.

FlutterConf India 2023 — Conference Sponsorship

2023 was the year when for the first time we co-sponsored a technology event. Attending FlutterConfIndia 2023 as a sponsor was a truly humbling experience for us.

Technology Posts

This year we contributed 160+ technology and related posts

Acknowledgments

The concluding AHM (All Hands Meet) of this year had a special mention of our Super Moms & Dads at NonStop! Many of our teammates grew into young parents over the last couple of years, and the way they handled parenting along with their responsibilities at NonStop was truly commendable which was worthy of mention and celebration!

A similar sentiment was extended towards our support system in the form of the superwomen who handle our Ops, Marketing, and Hiring teams. It is not very often that the work they do gets appreciated, and hence acknowledging the same this time around made a lot of sense.

This year our #Heroes Slack channel was brimming with superhuman stories worth mentioning 🦸🏻‍♀️🦸🏻

Pursuit of a Meaningful Life

Throughout the year, the team got together to discuss varied topics.

HealthyMe-HealthyWe

This year we started the #HealthyMe-HealthyWe initiative at NonStop, where we shared all the tips-n-tricks that we were adopting individually to stay fit, physically as well as mentally. These included exercise regimes, physiotherapy sessions, food, drink-water updates setup, daily work scheduling, etc. In this process, we happened to cultivate good and healthy habits, not just individually, but in our families as well! 10K steps, casual runs, walks, and 21KM half-marathons were a norm at NonStop! 😎

Saving&Investing

Like every year, we also discussed about saving and investing. A few topics we took a deep dive into were —

What is Financial Planning?
What is the ultimate goal of saving and investing?
What is a Need vs What is a Want?
What are different asset allocations in investing?
What are the different types of risks in (financial) life?
How to and how not to invest
What are Mutual Funds? What are the different types of Mutual Funds?

It was wonderful to see the younger ones understand the nuances of saving and investing, and then planning to astutely execute their individual saving and investing plans!

Learning & Teaching

This year too individuals in the team stepped up and attempted to educate each other, on technical and non-technical topics.

Being there when it matters!

This year, very often we showed up, as a team (and individuals) to celebrate every possible occasion and help each other, personally, professionally, and somewhere in the middle too 😇

This year we were better at listening to each other’s perspectives, and feedback, and individually tried changing ourselves for the better.

This year as a team and as individuals, we were a bit less judgemental about the comments and feedback we received — from our peers, leads, and juniors. We tried to be our better selves with each passing day, be as software developers, quality assurance engineers, backend architects, AI engineers, product managers, or technology strategists.

With a deep sense of gratitude towards our families, vendors & clients; we yet again step into another eventful year at NonStop…learning, contributing, and having fun all along.

Dear 2024 — Looking forward to welcoming you with all the awe in the world 🪄

Peace ✌🏽

— — —

If you’ve liked what you read, then you might want to glance through these too:

Here to make the community stronger by sharing our knowledge. Follow me and my team to stay updated on the latest and greatest in the Applied AI, web, & mobile tech world.