There are five key benefits of engaging an agency that we have learned from working with a number of startups and businesses of different configurations—from no technical staff to just a couple new engineers, or even full dedicated engineering teams.

Last week we launched two new paid sites and we're taking a different approach to each of them. We also celebrated an anniversary.

Our leading Django hosting service, Gondor, is no longer just for Django.

Every engineering organization or company has their own unique way of doing things. Companies tend to start with processes and tools that are well known (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, Github-Flow, etc.) and perhaps tweak them to meet their specific needs and/or temperaments. Eldarion has done more than just tweak an established process.

The Eldarion team are back at PyCon again this year.

In the last few months, we've open sourced a lot more of our Django apps and contributed them to the Pinax ecosystem.

2011 was the year Eldarion really got into the groove of taking ideas to launch faster—for our clients, our partners and ourselves. What did we achieve in 2011?

If a shared password is the only way for my team to use your service, you're doing it wrong!

Two years ago, we launched what has turned out to be one of our most successful sites, Typewar. In the last couple of weeks we've been rolling out a major new aspect to the typeface-identification game: Quests.

It was a week or so before DjangoDash 2011. As the major sponsor of the dash, we had made the decision to not compete, but we did want to have our own internal Dash. As usual, James had an idea—a programming language chrestomathy.

Gondor was built over the past couple of years in response to Eldarion's needs as a web agency as well as the development of our own sites.

We're looking to expand our team of contractors that help us to build great Django sites for our clients.