BarCamp New Orleans was this past weekend and I decided to put a presentation together that gave people a look under the hood of Flatsourcing.

One thing we are passionate about is having a great working relationship with our clients, and we know the key to success is communication. We’ve built some amazing processes over the years, and really have our CTO, Timur Vafin, and Oleg Kurnosov to thank for some of the wonderful customer processes that we have in place. Below is the presentation from BarCamp NOLA.

Have questions about our processes? Get in touch, and we’ll tell you all about them.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of getting a sneak peak at a new web app a client of ours is working on. The project is preparing to kick off and our clients designer put together the most complete and well laid out wireframe I have ever come across.

It got me thinking about the elements that make up a successful project and specifically how taking the time to wireframe the requisite pieces and parts of an app helps both the designers and the developers build a more complete view of the goals on an individual project.

One thing that really stuck out in the wireframe I was shown by our client was the amount of care the designer put into it, and how they took into account the smallest of details.

In laying out a specific component he even added an entry for “really long name…”, giving the developers a very clear lead on how to handle the unavoidable point where a user chooses a name that doesn’t fit cleanly into the space alloted for display of each users handle.

There are a number of tools you can use to wireframe your project, and this article from “One Extra Pixel” gives a good overview on the importance of wireframes and a list of some of the best tools available for creating your own.

If you have an idea for an app and are looking for assistance scoping or building it out, feel free to give us a shout and see what we can do for you.

Would like to announce to everybody that for a day-to-day communication in addition to regular skype calls and chats and also basecamp, etc. type of communication have set up new thing in office with developers: phone.

The new things is…….same old phone. The only difference is in that it’s the phone number just as if we’re sitting in NOLA with our colleagues: +1 504 322-76-57. Vonage VoIP. It’s connected to the wireless headset and also phone with pretty loud speakerphone for the multiple people type of the call in the conference room!

In our daily work we usually use Basecamp (BC) for communication on projects and Lighthouse (LH) for tasks & bugs tracking. I’m sure you know how BC and LH rocks, so I will tell you how to integrate BC time tracking feature with LH tickets.

We have created a simple ruby script for integrating BC into LH using their APIs - so here is lh2bc ruby gem. Lh2Bc creates projects and tickets created in LH as to-do lists and to-do items in the BC accordingly, so you can track work time in the BC’s to-dos in a simple way.

Lh2Bc can

• create new BC to-do lists, when new LH projects appears
• create new BC to-do items, when new LH tickets appears
• mark as completed BC to-do item if LH ticket is closed
• associate BC user with LH user

How to use

• if you being a developer spend some time working on some ticket, just specify these hours in the associated BC to-do item.
• various developers can specify hours for the same ticket.
• at the end of the week you can create BC time report and find who is the best rock star in your company for this week

Installation

• sudo gem install fs-lh2bc -s https://gems.gihub.com
• setup Lighthouse and Basecamp sections in the config.yml
• setup association between LH and BC users in the users.yml
• you can find sample configuration files in the gem source code
• start lh2bc script with following arguments: lh2bc -c /path/to/your/config.yml -u /path/to/your/users.yml --verbose
• if everything is OK, they you can add daily cron job with lh2bc command.

Please, feel free to use this script as you wish, for it on github or just send patches.