Johannesburg, South Africa – February 8th, 2022 Intenda has announced its acquisition of a majority stake in Kaleidocode, a KZN-based technology company specialising in enterprise software development.
Intenda was founded in South Africa in 2001 and has expanded into a multinational organisation with offices in the UK, EU and USA. Currently in a phase of significant growth, the strategic objective behind the acquisition is to offer enhanced service delivery in the bespoke development space. Since its inception in 2011, Kaleidocode has established a reputation for excellence, delivering projects for blue chip companies including Lexis Nexis, Mr Price and SA Home Loans, among others. Kaleidocode’s founders and current directors Rory Clarke, Chris Tite and Johan Bisschoff will continue in their roles, remaining closely involved in the business at both an operational and strategic level. They have appeared as speakers at various technology conferences around the world and are known for their deep understanding of the processes associated with successful software project implementation, as well as their innovative approach to growing and mentoring development staff. Their expertise will be invaluable to the Intenda Group. Joining them as Kaleidocode directors will be Dean Peerless, CEO of the Intenda Group, and James Powell, the group’s Chief Financial Officer. Intenda Group CEO Dean Peerless comments: “Intenda and Kaleidocode are a natural fit. We are both passionate about technology, invested in our people and clients, and we share similar values. I believe that by bringing our resources together, we can achieve something special. I’m very excited about Kaleidocode coming onboard and look forward to working together.” Rory Clarke, Kaleidocode Managing Director, shares his views: “We are excited about the amalgamation of Intenda and Kaleidocode. The international footprint of the group coupled with the technology forward thinking of both organisations bodes well for exponential growth. As directors we are protective of the culture of excellence and innovation that we have fostered at Kaleidocode and we believe few companies would be able to walk that journey with us. We are delighted to have found like-minded partners in Intenda and anticipate great things for the future.” The acquisition of Kaleidocode takes Intenda a step closer towards its ambition of becoming a global leader and visionary in technology. The bringing together of these two established companies’ expertise can only mean a positive and exciting shift, not only for Intenda and Kaleidocode, but also for their clients and the industry at large. Find the company websites at: https://intenda.tech https://www.kaleidocode.co.za/ For media enquiries or interviews please contact: Intenda: Marilé Peerless at marilep@intenda.za.com / +27 12 6638815 Kaleidocode: Philippa Rose-Tite at info@purpleraindrop.co.za/ +27 836449351
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Event Streaming is a powerful software architecture pattern which when applied to enterprise systems can create flexible, decoupled systems. Often when working with Legacy Systems we are not afforded the opportunity to leverage flexible design patterns and the latest technology to extend our architectures. Chris shares how we leveraged obscure technology in SQL to provide a stream of data events which were pushed into event streaming technologies like Kafka and Event Store, helping us create a decoupled enterprise system. Chris walks you through how we implemented this approach on a legacy system; setting out the principles behind the approach and walking you through the code. Starting with a legacy SQL database he introduces you to the often not talked about features that empower the developer to hook into SQL replication events to provide instant access to data events. Using these SQL events we'll turn the data into a json stream making it available for Kafka or Event Store to consume. Next, you will fire up a Kafka Docker container and configure Kafka topics for event streaming, exposing event streams which newer parts of the system can consume. Since Kafka is a powerful, transient event streaming technology we consider a more persistent event streaming technology like Event Store. Chris demonstratesanother Docker container, configure a series of event streams and shows the power of Event Store projections to create a decoupled architecture. Finally, Chris contrasts the two event streaming technologies to find the best fit for architecting change in legacy systems. Event Streaming in a legacy system shouldn't be difficult - here are ideas on how to do this. We normally post about community training and presentations that Kaleidocode is hosting or supporting. But a lot of knowledge sharing happens behind the scenes inside Kaleidocode as well. So, it being the season for sharing, we thought we would peel back the veil and let you know a little about what learning and knowledge sharing happens between Kaleidocoders. As you may suspect a lot of knowledge sharing happens within the company, and one of those initiatives is our monthly knowledge sharing sessions. This year we expanded these monthly events to incorporate everybody in the company. Whether technical or business, developer or finance we invited everyone to come, listen, present and share on areas they are passionate about. This has been very successful and attendance has been phenomenal! So how do we go about it? Well, everyone is invited to suggest topics, offer to present topics and to vote on which topics resonate the most. Then folks attend the sessions that appeal to them and come prepared with their thoughts and opinions. As you can imagine that has lead to a wide variety of subjects and formats of sharing throughout the year. But here are a few that stood out and made us all think and learn: 1. Running better projects (how do we improve how we run our projects?). In this early 2019 session we uncovered elements like risk mitigation, improved client communications, and showing visual project progress earlier and more often. 2. More effective Scrums & Sprint Planning sessions (how can we improve and make them more effective?). This sharing session focused on Story Points, Design Sprints and how we run Retros. It was such an awesome session, that included so many ideas that we ran out of time and had to make our next session a Part 2 …. 3. More effective Scrums & Sprint Planning sessions Part 2. In this follow up to the first efficacy session we focused on Scrum in general. This was a big topic for everyone in the room! Lots of discussion, sharing and debate around issues we have with scrum and what ideas we had to improve it. 4. Mid-year Retrospective. We held a general session that reflected on all the topics we had shared on thus far in 2019. We wanted to promote the most important learnings, whilst also introducing these concepts to staff who had missed some of the sessions. We decided that this meeting would be facilitated in a unique and fresh way. We used a format called the “Fishbowl”. It turned out to be very popular, and really got people talking and sharing. The Fishbowl activity is great for keeping a focused conversation, while having a large group of people. At any time, only a few people have a conversation (the fish in the fishbowl). The remaining people are listeners (the ones watching the fishbowl). The caveat is that the listeners can join the discussion at any moment. Lots of fun. 5. What is an Agile Consultant?
The Fishbowl method was used again for this session. We discussed what it means to be a consultant, and whether or not we are leaning hard enough into being agile. This spawned many conversations about what it means to be truly agile. This took us back to the original agile manifesto with particular focus on the core 4 values and 12 principles of agile. 6. What is the purpose of UAT? This was a robust team discussion on user acceptance testing, what it is, why we do it, and as always …how we could be more agile and effective in how we approach it. We covered live events, handovers, tester/user sessions and so much more. Who knew how heated we could get on one topic. 7. Changing the mindset of Agile Teams. Agile is not about practicing Scrum, XP or Kanban. It is a mindset that one needs to cultivate. Agile can so easily become theoretical, a series of steps. This session challenged us to revisit why we need to think openly, focus on continuous improvement and remain aware of reflecting on how we have performed and how we can remove waste from our processes. 8. Story Points. As much as estimation can be a thorny issues, agile estimation is a core part of measuring our traction. Drawing off excellent resources such as Matt Cohn's agile estimation thesis, we got to the core of how we measure complexity, what are story points, and what is their purpose in terms of driving team communication and functional decomposition. Not an easy session, but certainly thought provoking and likely to be revisited. Suffice it to say monthly company wide knowledge sharing sessions have become a popular vehicle for safely sharing and learning for everyone in the company in 2019. We are excited about what 2020 will bring in this space. More sharing and more learning? Definitely! Kaleidocoders dressed up in their finery to celebrate 2019 and to bestow awards on their peers, then formalities over, they entered into the spirit of the day with gusto! A fantastic day was had by all, a big thank you to this year’s Social committee who pulled off yet another wonderful event! The venue was quintessentially Durban taking in views of the harbour. Part of the festivities required some fancy footwork allowing folks to display their hidden talents in a lip sync battle team. We really appreciate our teams and their spirit of getting involved!
Thank you Durban! What a great Instruct event well supported by the local community this week. Software Architect and speaker, Chris Tite, delivered a challenging expose of his journey into applying agile techniques to mentoring employees at Kaleidocode's training centre on November, 20th 2019. As Chris explains it, we manage the outcome of our software projects using Agile principles and techniques like time boxed cycles, shorter feedback cycles and small defined outcomes… so why don’t we apply these techniques to staff growth? Staff grow at different rates, they have unique needs and differing circumstances, so why do we impose a one-size-fits-all approach to staff development? Furthermore, why do we subject our teams to a sterile and delayed feedback KPO / KPI approach in the tech industry, an industry that is growing and experiencing rapid change?
These are all questions that puzzled him. Five years ago Chris started mentoring team members using an agile approach which was refined over time and with each iteration, it is now an accepted and valued practice on all my teams. This is his story. During his talk he unpacked:
He shared his thoughts on a fresh approach to mentoring team members which ultimately results in;
The catering was top notch and the attendees had a fantastic time. The popular Lets Test conference is being held this year in Cape Town. There is an amazing line up of local and international speakers this year; covering tools, workshops, and straight presentations. The keynote is being delivered by Leo Hepis on "Its context-driven, not cult driven testing" which is going to be an explosive start to the event. If you are not familiar with Lets Test, here is a short description about what makes the conference tick, straight from the organisers mouth: "When we say ”for testers, by testers” we mean that our main goal for these conferences is to make them a valuable experience for all participants, not to maximize profit. We are ourselves part of a team made up of serious, passionate and professional testers that back in 2011 decided that it was time to set up a context-driven testing conference in Europe. Since the inaugural Let’s Test conference in 2012, some team members have left and others have been added, and the conference has expanded to been organized in Australia as well as in Europe, and South Africa. We’re happy to see the Let’s Test family grow, but regardless of where you visit a Let’s Test conference, you can be sure that we’ll never compromise on the “for testers, by testers” principle." Our own director, Chris Tite will be attending the 2019 SA edition, fresh off hosting this week's Instruct event, sharing on agile people development. Chris is being joined by Charne Dall our resident test guru and Nathan Van Wyk our test lead from our sister skills company Pivot. The event runs from Sunday, 24th to 26th November. See the full program here. If you are in Cape Town then drop by and catch up with us there. |
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