With the hoopla around the announcement of Google’s new Chrome OS, I am reminded of why I’ve never been a “Mac” person, or a “Windows” person, or  a “Linux” person. The fact is, I don’t really care what the platform is as long as I can access the place where all of my productivity tools, news outlets, and entertainment options live, the Internet.

I love that we went from terminals with mainframe access to massive resource hogging OS based systems, and now we are moving back to the “antique” distributed terminal model with the entire Internet becoming our mainframe.

Of course, we have heard this before, just check out the quote from Marc Andreessen from 1996, “The only difference technically between Netscape’s Navigator browser and a traditional operating system is that Navigator will not include device drivers.”

That’s why I’m so pleased to be able to work with Flatsourcing and our clients develop services and applications that are OS independent. As I recently explained to someone who was asking what all this “web stuff” is, we just develop software solutions that you never have to install.

And lest I forget, Happy Birthday Anton!

Yippe!

Anton is one year older now! We’re very proud to say that he’s part of the team this year and hope it would be like that further!

Anton Rogov

He’s not only second smartest guy in the company (this place is reserved by CTO Timur Vafin ), but also one of the most positive and fast-thinking reacting person. We’re all trying to learn from him how to perform good stay positive and smiling He’s probably most positive Russian I’ve ever met indeed!

Anton, you’re definitely our MVP out of the whole staff and hope you with Timur will bring the team in the right direction in terms of technologies and together we can create one day something very good, like Google search engine for example!
Way to go and cograts with your birthday, man!

We’ve been working hard to update the identity of Flatsourcing.com over the last month since Peter and I got back from Russia.

We’re trying to continue to narrow our focus on what we do best and what best serves our clients.  That is:

• Retainer-based Contracts - we want to be aligned with our clients, and we feel like bidding on RFP’s and traditional contract structures put us at odds with our clients by reducing our ability to build anything they want in an agile way.  We’d rather just get on board in a low-risk month-to-month retainer with you.  Of course, we know you need to estimate things, so we can provide you a basic man-month estimate on how long we think something will take.
• Working with Technical Clients - we work best with startups and web design firms, not end users. We like it when we are managed in a very granular way.  The more experienced you are, the greater the likelihood for success.  Let your CTO or lead developer manage our developers, and we’ll do the heavy lifting.
• Strong Agile Processes - We’re moving from simplified project management in Basecamp to more granular ticketing or story-based approaches with Trac, Lighthouse, Pivotal Tracker or Jira with our clients.  We also will participate in daily standups via Skype chat or voice.  To top it all off, we’ll produce daily & weekly management reports, so you can track productivity. Whatever you use, we will learn.  A strong system begets great results.

To that end, we’re updating our identity to better reflect who we are today.  Here’s a stab at what you’ll be seeing on our homepage soon.

Our clients are start-ups and web design firms. If you’re looking to grow, we should talk.

We work the way you do, using modern tools and an agile methodology. Our process is different with every client, and once we get it down together, it flows like clockwork.

The more technical you are the better, we love being held to the highest standards for code quality. Why not put us to the test right now?

So, whether you’re a start-up looking to build a rapid prototype or scale an existing app, or a web design firm that needs a programmer working on multiple projects at once, we’re ready to go to work.

Together with our clients, we’ve built:

• Facebook applications with millions of users
• Award-winning analytics software
• Front-end design for major e-commerce site

Our proudest achievements are true collaborations with our clients. If you’ve got great UI design and know what you want your app to do, we’ll get under the hood and build it. Let’s get to work together.