Evolution: the challenge of change and adaptation

One day you wake up ready for your routine of washing up, breakfast and heading off to work, nothing out of the ordinary in a person's life.

Out of nowhere you get a message asking for your help to set up some configurations to maintain a local server for managing code versions of a project we know no details about.

Surprise: someone wants to build a classic package to install on their computers with a database, nothing out of this world, a server installed and, a few conversations later, out comes the big proposal: "Why, instead of building a classic, obsolete desktop computer program, do we build a global system that, through the internet, lets us connect and work from any computer in the world?". After all, tourism is about travelling, and it would be very contradictory if, to work in tourism, you had to sit still in an office.

Looking back, even before reaching the year 2010 —when smartphones were valued more for the quality of the games you could have or the amount of music you could load, when websites had evolved into a new stage of dynamic and multimedia content, when companies still hadn't finished swapping their classic bulky screens for the new resolutions of the lightweight LCD or LED displays—, in short, before reaching the first decade of the new millennium, the shift from a world centred on the work of small, separate groups was about to evolve into those same small groups, but working together and interconnected regardless of distance.

So that proposal, born from an idealistic conversation, gathered great momentum and, from one day to the next, with three key elements:

1. A leader convinced that globally-reaching technology is the future.
2. A new team willing to use the best of the web tools of the moment to take on a futuristic technological challenge.
3. A market waiting for a revolution that would make them drop their Word or Excel files for a system that speeds up their work and makes their lives simpler.

In a small office in La Paz, Bolivia, the development of TOOGO began: an expert system aimed at inbound tourism professionals located anywhere on the planet, with the capacity to have ERP and CRM features, concepts in constant evolution in the world of computing.

TOOGO's story is marked by the constant challenges posed by the constant and ever-faster technological evolution. If anything defines us, it's our adaptability to those changes and technological advances. To give a small summary: we went from a simple monolithic-server structure to an architecture of independent, distributed servers; a few years passed and we entered the world of the cloud, a concept that, as its name suggests, constantly expands and changes, adapting to the new needs of an environment that increasingly wants to improve how it handles information.

Today, faithful to our motto of adaptability and evolution, we face a new challenge: Artificial Intelligence, which at first was made out to be the enemy of development companies, the one that would leave developers jobless and end the world of systems as we knew it until now.

Evidently, the world of classic systems we know is over; pretending to deny that is fooling yourself. At Toogonet we're very aware of the now and of the future: the whole team decided not to see AI as a predatory enemy, but as one of our best allies, which will help us take TOOGO to the next level, to consolidate the robust, solid tool we already have with ever friendlier, simplified interfaces, with capabilities to interconnect with global platforms.

The new challenge is on the table and the Toogonet team is ready to take it on. But we won't do it alone — the whole community around us will too. All our users are invited to take part in the new crusade of technological evolution. We won't leave them on their own, because their needs are a key part of TOOGO's growth.

To finish, as part of the TOOGO technical team, we very rarely get to read or hear a thank-you from one of our users. But through this medium I allow myself to thank them for giving me the chance to grow constantly, to let me think of new things every day and try to put myself in their shoes to feel their experience of using the system. Thank you.

Note: I didn't use AI to write this article. For better or worse, we're still capable of doing things by ourselves.