Flatsourcing

Kazan 1005th City Anniversary

Chris Schultz — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 03:27:23 +0000

Just wanted to send a quick hello from Kazan to everyone! I’m in the hotel bar getting ready for a day at the office. It’s getting to be a lot of fun to come over here and see the growth every year. I’m traveling w/ my partner Peter Bodenheimer, and we are visiting the whole crew, almost 30 people in the office over here now. We’ve grown from just one office of 3 guys to literally taking over the whole office building. Amazing.

Last night was the city’s 1005th anniversary and there was a fireworks celebration and lots of revelry in the streets. In fact, until about 20 min ago, I was sharing the bar with a group finishing up a late night dinner (its now 7am). Every year we come over here the city changes. Last night I ran into the first American I’ve ever met over here (on a tour no less). And on the flight over, there was a crew from a European wireless provider coming over to launch a new 4G network, just the second in the world, here. We truly feel like New Orleans and Kazan are sister cities this year: we have the world-champion football team, the Saints, and they have the current Russian champion soccer and hockey teams.

Chris Schultz on the CNN

Oleg Kurnosov — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:00:27 +0000

While Chris and Peter are here in Kazan we’ve been talking about everything and it was very exciting to see Chris Schultz on the CNN:

It’s good to have you all here!

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Peter Bodenheimer — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:52:36 +0000

Recently I’ve become a big fan of the RSA Animate videos on YouTube. I thought this one was particularly relevant to web app development and the type of people drawn to it. Hope you enjoy this animation of a talk by Dan Pink, author of Drive.

Rapid Prototyping Resources

Peter Bodenheimer — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:29:59 +0000

We spend a lot of time scouring the web for resources to assist us in improving our business. With the number of web application prototypes we have been working on lately, we think the following resources can be as valuable to you as they have been to us.

Smashing Magazine - Design Better & Faster with Rapid Prototyping

Adaptive Path - Spreadsheet of Rapid Prototyping Tools

Venture Hacks - What is the Minimum Viable Product

Venture Hacks - 10 Examples of Minimum Viable Products

OnStartups - From Minimally Viable to Maximally Buyable Product

The Ruby on Rails EcoSystem

Peter Bodenheimer — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:53:35 +0000

Our core business is, has been, and likely will be for a long time, the development of web applications using Ruby on Rails. Sometimes we get into discussions about how Ruby on Rails compares to other Frameworks and why we focus on Rails versus other options. We’ve done projects here and there using other web application frameworks, including: Symfony, Code Igniter, Django, and Flex among others. Each framework has it’s benefits, but in the long run the thing that keeps us coming back to Ruby on Rails is the ecoSystem.

EcoSystem seems like a bit of a buzzword, but in the end it’s simply a way to describe the elements that surround the framework and make working with it that much easier and more productive. Whether it’s hosting providers, dev tools, communities for support, conferences, or training, Rails has a hugely vibrant ecosystem that magnifies the value of working with it.

What are your thoughts on the Framework discussion?

Types of meetings we do in company

Oleg Kurnosov — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:45:17 +0000

Just wanted to refresh on the types of meetings we do in company according to Scrum logic. So once again, it’s not something we’ve invented, it’s standard logic used by other respected teams as well.

Type 1: Daily Scrum

Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. This is called a “daily scrum”, or “the daily standup”. This meeting has specific guidelines:

The meeting starts precisely on time.
All are welcome, but only “pigs” may speak
The meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes
The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day

During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:

What have you done since yesterday?
What are you planning to do today?
Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal? (It is the role of the ScrumMaster to facilitate resolution of these impediments. Typically this should occur outside the context of the Daily Scrum so that it may stay under 15 minutes.)

Type 2: Sprint Planning Meeting

At the beginning of the sprint cycle (every 7–30 days), a “Sprint Planning Meeting” is held.

Select what work is to be done
Prepare the Sprint Backlog that details the time it will take to do that work, with the entire team
Identify and communicate how much of the work is likely to be done during the current sprint
Eight hour limit
- (1st four hours) Product Owner + Team: dialog for prioritizing the Product Backlog
- (2nd four hours) Team only: hashing out a plan for the Sprint, resulting in the Sprint Backlog

At the end of a sprint cycle, two meetings are held: the “Sprint Review Meeting” and the “Sprint Retrospective”

Type 3: Sprint Review Meeting

Review the work that was completed and not completed
Present the completed work to the stakeholders (a.k.a. “the demo”)
Incomplete work cannot be demonstrated
Four hour time limit

Type 4: Sprint Retrospective

All team members reflect on the past sprint
Make continuous process improvements
Two main questions are asked in the sprint retrospective: What went well during the sprint? What could be improved in the next sprint?
Three hour time limit

Entrepreneurship, TechStars, and Ruby on Rails

Peter Bodenheimer — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:04:17 +0000

For any of you that follow me or CEO Chris Schultz on Twitter (or on his blog at ChrisSchultz.net), you know that we are both incredibly interested and involved in helping to build an increasingly vibrant entrepreneurial community in New Orleans. Thanks to a fortunate chain of events (and a little help from our friends), Chris and I were able to make the trip up to Boston last week to attend the Demo Night of TechStars Boston’s 2010 class. If you’re not familiar with TechStars you should be. They are one of the premier seed accelerator programs in the United States and have helped launch a number of successful startups (SendGrid, OneForty, and Graphic.ly among others) from their programs in Boulder, Boston, and now Seattle. Demo Night is the culmination of 3 months of intense work resulting in the opportunity for each company to spend up to 8 minutes pitching a crowd of 150+ angel investors and VCs.

One of the companies in this years class, LoudCaster was a company we had the pleasure of working with right before they joined the program and I was particularly excited to see how the last 3 months had shaped their company and their app. It’s easy for me to say that I was impressed both by how far along their app is and by how polished and advanced their company at this point. I can also say without any hesitation that the other 9 presenters all impressed me with their offerings as well.

The companies we had the opportunity to interact with included:

Appswell is a mobile crowd sourcing system that allows people, companies, and brands to harness the wisdom of crowds.

Loudcaster lets anyone create interactive online radio stations quickly and easily. Their model is to sell Internet broadcasting tools to DJs and to generate revenue by aggregating their audiences and inserting advertising.

Marginize augments pages on the web with an independent space owned by the visitors where they can meet each other and interact freely.

Mogotest is a front-end testing tool to help companies ensure that their web sites render properly across various web browsers and platforms.

Monkey Analytics powers mathematics and data analysis in the cloud by providing on-demand computing resources, analysis tools, and a socially driven marketplace for analysts, algorithms, and data.

SocialSci helps academic and professional researchers source and survey participants for their scientific studies.

Sparkcloud introduces you to interesting people who are around you in realtime.

StarStreet is a sports stock market that allows sports fans to make real money based on their skill in trading players and their knowledge of sports.

TutorialTab lets non-developers add interactive help systems that make web sites easier to learn. TutorialTab helps website owners enhance the user experience without writing a line of code.

UserMojo is an emotion analytics platform that measures the quality of user experience to help site owners understand not just what their users are doing, but also why they’re doing it.

For more on each of these companies, take a look at Don Dodge’s recap of the evening on “The Next Big Thing”.

The other thing that struck me as I had discussions with the companies after the pitches were over was how many of them have chosen Ruby on Rails to build a significant portion of their applications. While we have been focused on Ruby on Rails at Flatsourcing for a number of years, it seems there is a constant barrage of new frameworks coming out and it is a great testament to the quality of the Rails framework that is is being used by such a diverse and talented group of companies. It reinforces my core belief that by focusing on the elements of our business that provide the most value to our clients and being the very best that we can at them, we are on the path to continued success.

If you’re interested in how Flatsourcing can help you with your development needs, feel free to give us a shout.

Introducing Hu.la - our new URL shortener

Chris Schultz — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:36:15 +0000

I am excited to introduce Voodoo’s latest project, Hu.la, a URL shortener. If you’re reading this post, you probably got here via a tweet or Facebook post via a short link. While largely a commodity now, we decided to get in on the action too. We secured this domain name earlier this year, and decided to launch our own URL shortner. We’ve been using it internally for a couple months and now are rolling it out publicly so you can too.

One of the fun things about having the great engineering talent at Flatsourcing is being able to pursue projects like this, and occasionally they require a few hacks. So, we want to share the story of how we built Hu.la:

bit.ly is the leader in the URL shortner space and we applied to and were accepted in the beta of their bitly.pro program.
The bitly.pro service powers New York Times, Amazon and TechCrunch’s own URL shorterns too. You can sign up here.
In order to get a homepage that allows others to access the service, we took a lesson from the guys who created 511cc.org using bitly.pro.
And voila: we’ve launched Hu.la - take your links for a spin today.

Any questions or suggestions, please let us know. We’d love your feedback and for you to make it your default URL shortening service.

Iterative Improvement of a Business

Peter Bodenheimer — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:46:37 +0000

In our most recent newsletter, we mentioned our new internal commitment to improving our business by following our “3 things per week” mantra. Everyone in business is, or should be, concerned with how they can optimize and improve their own business. We pay consultants and efficiency experts big bucks to tell us what we should be doing, when in fact we already know better than anyone else what steps we can take to save ourselves time and money.

“3 things per week” is a commitment we made to ourselves that each week, we will individually do 3 things that improve some aspect of our business. They don’t have to be something big, in fact they should be small, easily implemented changes that save you time in the long run. Each bit of time we can save is more time we have to focus on what’s important, our clients and the projects we are passionate about.

In essence, the idea of “3 things” is simply an extension of our practice of the Agile Methodology and the core element of iterative cycles of improvement. By focusing on small, easily implemented changes we can improve our business and build momentum towards larger goals because there is a sense of achievement in each small victory.

For arguments sake, let’s assume that, on average, each small thing I work to improve saves me 10 minutes a week. From there I save 30 minutes per week, 2 hours per month, and 24 hours per year. This adds up to value both in actual dollars and reclaiming lost opportunity cost.

We’ll continue to provide updates as we implement more of these improvements, but in the meantime we’d love to hear from you about how you work to improve your business.

Acceptance tests or breaking down tasks

Oleg Kurnosov — Thu, 13 May 2010 08:36:06 +0000

The answer here is definitely both for the stuff that is being done in sprints already especially. Larger team is needed for it to keep same velocity, however both technics are definitely something we’ve adopted. This is what’s needed to spend time on vs. rough estimates for longer than month periods.

It helps delivering each sprint cycle shippable product with 20% percent of system that people always use, not sometimes use, etc. So at the end of release (e.g. month with 4 sprints of a week) it’s 4 perfectly working user stories that are top priority vs. 10 features that may work and be used in future.