“Conversation must be preferred to anything.”

So said my neighbor, the old man, sipping on a good single malt late at night. It sounded like nostalgia. As he continued, I realized that this was not a reference to a story past, but his way of participating in the society he grew up with.

Conversation was the intention when we built our very first weblog, one year ago to the day: We wanted to talk to people. We wanted to hear their opinions and ideas to support and grow our own. We wanted them to throw us off balance, so we’d have to get up and get better. We wanted to talk to the world, learn and mature. As a communication company, after all, we wanted to communicate.

While there wasn't a clear audience to target, we knew that we wanted to focus on readability, accessibility, and quality content. This was supposed to become the publication we would enjoy ourselves, regularly. Responsive optimization, hero graphics and quality typography were our technical swords, but wielding the feather was yet to be learned. And boy, was this hard to learn. Creating crisp icons, quality HTML or clean databases had been the tools we were versed with. Putting an idea on the screen with words alone turned out to be much harder than expected, taking in consideration that most of us aren’t native English-speakers.

Lucky us, we got some help. Lucas Rocha, Marie Schweiz and The Brothers Chapman have been amazing guests on Squirrel Park. They added their unique personality to the conversation and helped us to further define the rhythm of the format.

Certainly, the collection of Android tips, language explorations, and wallpapers sets seems like a chaotic variety of thoughts. In fact, we were tempted more than once to add a stronger thematic focus to the blog, to draw a key audience and build a solid marketing channel upon the output. Ultimately, we decided against it. We wanted to keep this conversation casual, experimental and human; after all, each writing represents a thought, an experience or a story of the people behind the company. This is what Opoloo initially set out to become: a small electric space within the industry that favors humanity over profit and growth.

Now if you're still reading, you might be one of the people who has been following us over the last 12 months and 62 blog posts. Thank you for this. We want to hear from you, we want to talk to you. We even want to see you write on this blog and participate in the society that is the web.

Cheers to the next year. Let’s keep the conversation going.