How we work Archive

My First Quarter at DT (in Pictures)

Posted October 3rd, 2012

Since this week marks my 3-month anniversary, I wanted to share some of my favorite times at DeveloperTown with you all. Though I’m not much of a picture person myself, others around DT have done a fantastic job documenting the past few months, and I’ll try to give them credit when possible. Here are some of the many reasons that I’m glad that I chose to come to DeveloperTown:

1. The People

Joining DT is like joining a family. It’s a family suffering from a lack of sleep and fueled by caffeine, but it’s a family nonetheless. (Photo Credit: Mike Kelly)

 

2. The Houses

I love the ability to personalize your workspace and have your own little area to shut yourself away in. As they say at DT: “If the light is on, don’t come a-knocking…. because I’m busy.” The one pictured above is my fantastically blue house that I’ve been lucky enough to occupy for 2.5ish months.

 

3. The Dogs

Where else are you greeted by an adorable dog like Digby the moment you walk in the door? Pictured above are Digby (Justin Kime’s golden), Maggie (Mike Kelly’s newest canine addition to the family), and Murphy (Kelly’s giant irish wolfhound). (Photo Credit: AR3)

 

4. The Innovation Showcase

The Innovation Showcase took place 9 days after I started work at DeveloperTown. It was a great way to meet a bunch of clients, friends of DT, and other members of the Indy startup community while building excitement about everything going on in Indy right now. (Photo Credit: Unknown)

 

5. Hack ‘Em Ups

Every other Tuesday night, many of us get together to work on internal projects. These Hack ‘Em Ups have yielded things like TroopTrack (Dave’s company), PongTracker, and Versus! (Photo Credit: AR3)

 

6. The Events

Sometime it seems like there is a new event every week at DeveloperTown, ranging from the TedX Indy Auditions (pictured above) to a charity ping pong tournament to the Pre-Seed Workshop (wrapping up today!) (Photo Credit: John Wechsler)

 

7. The Nerdiness

DeveloperTown is one of the most fantastically nerdy places I’ve ever been. Walking around, you can hear conversations on topics like garbage collection, bacterial evolution, particle physics, and even the most realistic way for the world to end. Just last week, a set of four Battlestar Galactica posters showed up at our door, and almost everyone was excited about them. (Photo Credit: Jeb Banner)

 

8. The Nerf Guns

Nerf battles are a weekly occurrence, and we recently completed our first round of DT Assassins (which was won by Josh Littlejohn). It’ll be a long time before I forget the way that Celeste Baker walked into scrum on her last day (think Lara Croft but wearing heels and carrying nerf guns.)

 

8. The Community

There is a strong community of entrepreneurs in Indianapolis. Pictured above are those that graduated/are connected to Rose-Hulman at our quarterly get-together (that took place at DT last month)! (Photo Credit: Jim Bertoli)

 

There are dozens of other reasons that I’m glad I moved to DT, but these are some of the most prevalent (and easiest to find pictures of).

What are some of your favorite things about DeveloperTown?

Posted in How we work | No Comments »

New DT Townies- Developers

Posted August 9th, 2012

By now, you’ve hopefully all read about the new members of the design team and are anxiously awaiting to learn about the other five newbies to join the list of DeveloperTown townies.

Today’s post will be all about the new members of the Development Team, Jason Pitcher, Caleb Anderson, and Joe Burns. All three of them joined DT in July, making them our three newest townies. Until their houses arrive, they are inhabiting the desks in the corner that were formerly the home of Musical DNA.

 

Jason Pitcher

A recent Full Sail graduate, this is Jason’s first job since getting his B.S. in Game Development. Before that, he was a software tester for Interactions (where he met many of the DT townies including Partner Mike Kelly) and a Satellite systems operator for the U.S. Air Force. His favorite past projects are still protected by NDAs, so he’s not allowed to share them.

Jason will be joining the SaaS team, where he will be doing “native code stuff”. Jason is also helping implement our internal client database. In his free time, he likes to read books and play video games. He like barbecues and antique books.

 

Caleb Anderson

Caleb comes to us from Musical DNA, where he did Unity, C-sharp, and Rails site develpment. A friend of DT for years, he recently transitioned from being one of Musical DNA’s developers to one of ours! Before that, he was a student and a website developer. He particularly enjoyed Unity and “hopes to get back into that.”

Caleb also joins the SaaS team, where he will be utilizing his knowledge of Rails. In his spare time, he does some freelance work, bikes a lot, and likes to watch Big Bang Theory and Community. He doesn’t own a car and is part of the biking gang the Velo-nauts.

 

Joe Burns

A former employee of corporate America, Joe joins us from Staples, where he was part of the services oriented architecture team that established the SOA architecture. As the Senior Enterprise Architect, Joe worked on a mix of development, management, and infrastructure engineering. Before that, he helped build some of the original iterations of Monster.com.

At DT, he will be a member of the SaaS team, mostly doing Rails development and Developer Operations. He is married with a son (Jeremy) and lives less than a mile away. He is the most recent addition to the DT Brewmasters, as he enjoys all-grain brewing.

 

 

Left to Right: Jason Pitcher, Caleb Anderson, Joe Burns

 

Stay tuned for a post about the two new members to the Sales/Consulting team in a few days!

Posted in Announcements, How we work | No Comments »

New DT Townies- Design Team

Posted August 7th, 2012

If you’ve been around DT recently, you might have noticed many new faces. In the last few months, 9 new townies have joined the DeveloperTown Team. Over the next few days, I’m going to be introducing them so you can place a name and background to the faces!

This post is going to introduce the new members of the design team. What used to be Celeste and Justin has expanded to included Randy Fisher, Daryn Shapurji, Ben Huddleston, and Jeff Pope.

 

Randy Fisher (Partner)

Randy was brought on to take over the UI/UX team at DT. You’ll probably see him in any of your initial Design Sessions, and he will be coordinating the other members of the design team.

Before coming to DeveloperTown, Randy was the VP of Quality and Analytics at ChaCha, where his primary responsibility was developing product strategy and design for the ChaCha product/platform. He  has over 15 years of experience designing software across a variety of vertical markets. His favorite projects “are challenging from a user experience perspective – the kind that take total concentration to think through the solution from the user perspective and solve a problem through good design.”

Outside of DT, when he’s not playing with his kids, Randy is an aspiring chef, and avid gardner, and a movie buff. He also enjoys complaining about the design of everyday things (just ask his wife!)

 

Daryn Shapurji

Daryn is one of DT’s designers that also deals with user experience development. He is also at the top of DeveloperTown’s Ping Pong Leaderboard.

Before coming to Developertown, Daryn served as the Marketing Projects Coordinator at Rowland Design, where he worked on a variety of projects including redesigning, developing and handling their entire website from the ground up. His favorite projects at DT so far include Chideo and Sprezzat!

His hobbies include  flag football, making beer, fantasy football, game of thrones reading and tv show, weight lifting, huge movie buff, stock and company trends, stock market, Verge Start ups (where he is an Organizer and designer).

 

Simplexity Co-Founders Ben Huddleston and Jeff Pope

In April, when Partner Michael Coffey joined the DT team, he brought Ben and Jeff with him. Their company, Simplexity, is currently being housed in DeveloperTown while DT and Simplexity work on creating a long-term partnership to form a marketing division of DeveloperTown that complements the existing DT offerings.

Simplexity currently focuses on partnerships with Indianapolis-based marketing firms to expand their firms reach into marketing in the digital mediums. Simplexity has experience creating and managing successful marketing initiatives for companies ranging from startups thru Fortune 500. Along with the Simplexity business, Ben and Jeff have each brought their over 15 years experience, numerous talents, and even some clients to DT.

Ben will be primarily working on marketing sites under the umbrella of the design team. He particularly enjoys helping clients succeed and likes sharing those positives numbers from with clients whom have trusted and listen to his advice. He is a Jack-of-all-Trades that dislikes doing the same thing all day, every day. When he isn’t trying to get his two kids into bed, he likes to sleep. He also used to swim the Ohio River every year on his Birthday (which was a few weeks ago).

Jeff will also be joining the design team in conjunction with continued work for the marketing division. He enjoys bringing his creativity and visual ideas to life and looks forward to helping mentor some of the other designers on the team. Because he is married with two kids, he often feels like he has no spare time, however, if he did, he would use that time to ride motorcycles, travel, snow ski, and drink margaritas on a beach.

Left to Right: Randy Fisher, Daryn Shapurji, Ben Huddleston, Jeff Pope

 

Over the next week, look out for similar blog posts introducing the new developers and members of the sales/consulting team!

Posted in Announcements, How we work | 2 Comments »

The MVP Reading List

Posted May 21st, 2012

I regularly get asked for book references. From employees new to DeveloperTown, to founders who walk in the door and aren’t sure where to start, to people who look at what we do and how we work and ask how we figured all that stuff out. Some of it we figured out, much of it other people figured out and wrote down. We were smart enough to read it, apply it, and adapt it to the way we work. You can too.

Here is my take on the books that best capture how we think about product development. At DeveloperTown we’re big on iterative development (or as Ries puts it – small batches), customer development, validated learning, clean and simple design, and clean and simple business documents. The following books have been very influential in how we build our products:

The Lean Startup, Ries
The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Blank
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, Cooper and Vlaskovits
Business Model Generation, Osterwalder and Pigneur
Rework, 37 Signals

Because we often aren’t just building products, but are also helping founders build companies (and sometimes building them ourselves), I also recommend the following to help navigate venture capital, starting to understand what it’s going to be like working with investors once you get their money, and building and running a business:

The Art of the Start, Kawasaki
Venture Deals, Feld and Mendelson
Traction, Wickman
Founders at Work, Livingston

When it comes to the specifics of building our software, we use our own flavor of agile development – but in it’s early days it was strongly influenced by Scrum. We develop primarily using Rails and an army of controlled but ever-changing frameworks to go with it, we do everything in the cloud, and we test constantly (much of it automated, some of it manual, a bit of it with users). For those who want to know more about our development methodology and where it comes from, I recommend:

Lean Software Development, Poppendieck and Poppendieck
Agile Software Development with Scrum, Schwaber and Beedle
User Stories Applied, Cohn

That list doesn’t really touch on some of the development and testing principles, but that’s just because I’m not really aware of any good books out there that capture those concisely. I could recommend a bunch of books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf, and each of them would have a piece of it. But my experience is that much of that knowledge is captured in blog posts, on forums, and in the rich debate that happens between team members when they go to solve a problem. We post about some of those debates occasionally.

Finally, if you’re responsible for getting software out the door, there is another list you might be interested in. It’s the list on getting things done, managing the process, and shipping great software – some of the best works on project management I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot on the topic):

Ship It!, Richardson and Gwaltney
Making Things Happen, Berkun
Manage It!, Rothman
Release It!, Nygard

Some project managers may look at that list and say Release It! doesn’t belong there. They are wrong – it does. On small/agile projects, if the person leading the project isn’t constantly thinking of those things, then it’s very likely that no one is. For us, project management is the art of alternating between the strategic and the tactical, balancing tradeoffs, and communicating progress. To do that, you need to be knowledgeable (not expert – just knowledgeable) about all aspects of the product.

Posted in How we work, Publications | 7 Comments »

Things you know but never thought of…

Posted May 8th, 2012


Customers. We all work everyday to gain new ones, retain current ones and hopefully gain knowledge from them on how to make our products better to fit their needs.  Once we take this simplistic concept and actually execute on it, we then look to how we present our product to the consumers. We learn that there is a difference between feature and benefits. We learn that a feature that might be meaningless to the end user could provide entrée to multiple benefits that either make their lives easier or happier or both.  In order to make that happen, we need to define our customers. We need to know our market and how we can provide what that market needs/wants better than anyone else.

Today, I want to talk about who your customer really is. (I will tell you right now that this discussion is aimed at all companies that have employees.) When I ask this next question it can sometimes feel like a trick question or a trap. The reality is that it’s meant to make you think: to possibly shift how you might view your customer, or even better, shift your understanding of who your customer really is.  So here is the question, “Who is your primary customer?” Wikipedia defines a customer as

“A customer is the recipient of a good, service, product, or idea, obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier for a monetary or other valuable consideration.”

I agree with this definition and want to ask you again, “Who is your primary customer?” if you are like most, you will be thinking about who might be paying you the most or who might be taking most of your time. Today, I want to challenge you with the concept that your EMPLOYEES are your number one customer. Now, I guarantee you this will cause some debate but here is my personal view, one that I gained from not looking at my employees as my number one customer.  Every time you hire a new employee you are looking for a target personality, someone that fits you your need, but the one being hired is also looking for something that fits them and their needs. So let’s think about this. The one that you are about to hire is about to be “the recipient of a good, service, product, or idea (vision), obtained from a seller, vender, or supplier for a monetary OR other valuable consideration.” The OTHER in this statement is simply their time, their valuable life: a limited commodity that can not be given back. Honestly, I don’t think either side really thinks about work this way, but they should.

Now that we understand that those that you hire are purchasing what you offer with their life, their time! Let me ask you this, what product do you offer? Have you ever thought about productizing your values, mission, vision and comp plan? If not you leave yourself open of have employees with expectations that they define because you haven’t. We all know what happens when we have clients with unrealistic expectations… if never turns out good! So what do we do with this?

Define your Product:
Take your mission, vision, values and comp plan and present it to your future hire as a product with a clearly defined feature list resulting with benefits.

Value your customers:
Highlight what makes your services better than any other provider out there!

Get feedback from your customers:
Freaking listen to your employees!

Refine your product:
If your product is the same it was five years ago, I would argue you’re not listening and you’re not progressing

I guarantee that those that establish this mindset and set their employees as their primary focus will find that their secondary client (the paying ones) will be taken care of very nicely.

For those of you that are employees right now and reading this, thinking this is your anthem… understand that there will be a post coming just for you! You’re not off the hook just yet! Until then, let’s discuss!

PS: If you would like to know what the picture has to do with this post, ask me in the comments.

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Posted in Clients, How we work | 6 Comments »

“The Rise From The Middle” Why Indianapolis is the place to be… Even over California!

Posted May 1st, 2012

“Seriously?! You chose to move to Indy from California?” That is the first question I usually hear when I tell people that I did choose Indy over California just one month ago.

“Why!?” is the next question followed by

“Were you dropped on your head as a child?” which of course I answer with, “Yes, but that has nothing to do with it!”

To quickly explain, well that all depends on how fast you read, this is my story as to why I am here at DeveloperTown @DeveloperTown . (If you could care less of my story and just want to get to the facts of why I believe Indianapolis is by far the better place to be over California when it comes to the startup community, CLICK HERE)

Here we go…

I was born and raised in Napa Valley and I worked in the wine industry for a good amount of time.  Just so you know, I am game to talk wine with anyone that is a wino like me. I was raised around technology and was involved with some startups out of the Bay Area but never saw myself as an Entrepreneur. I loved people, leadership, process, and making things more efficient. If you were to ask me 10 years ago what my dream job was, it was being a camp director and surf instructor for the rest of my life… FYI, that didn’t happen.

About three years ago, I was provided the opportunity to raise money to purchase an account that I was managing from a company that I worked for and start a new company. Honestly, I had never raised money, I didn’t have aspirations of running a company, and I was a Communications major in college… enough said. I wrestled with this opportunity and realized that the biggest mistake I could make would be allowing fear to define my path in this life. With the support of many amazing people back in California and a supportive wife, I was able to raise $2.5m , acquire the account, and close the deal in less than 90 days. Over the next 45 days we went from 3 to 25 employees and within 10 months we grew to become a multi-million dollar company with offices in California and here in Indianapolis.  Last year I brought my family out to Indiana for what was supposed to be a 3-month stint and 14 months later I am still here!

I came to Indy to work with the office here and to better understand what this city had to offer. This is what I learned. Note that in the next couple paragraphs I am not name dropping but more giving shout outs to those that made the decision to choose Indy easier.

My family and I set our feet on Indiana soil three days before the epic ice storm of 2011. I have videos of using a hammer to clear the ice just to get into our offices! We wanted to go back home but I wasn’t going to let the weather deter me, I was interested in something more, interested in finding the TIPPING POINT. I had a strange feeling that Indy was gearing up to see a huge TIPPING POINT. (I will come back to this TIPPING POINT) So typically when I come to a new place I always want to know the people, the hearts of those people, and really see what drives the local community. One of the first people I met was a gentleman by the name of Greg Downey @greg_purim. Now Greg is a guy that you want on your side, one that could seriously hurt you if he wanted to, but he has a huge heart and a passion for startups,  a passion to connect people and a passion to help others succeed. Greg then started to introduce me to many people in Indy like Jeff Kirk of Bingham Greenebaum Doll LLP (who was a rock star for my company with a couple tough legal issues and has also introduced me to an amazing group of minds here in Indy), led me to Aaron Nelson @asnelson (who is an Indy native but is rocking it now at Google with Double Click), Michael Cloran @mecloran (a local rock star when it comes to innovative thinking) and last but not least Christopher Day and his brother Stephen, which if you don’t know the Days, your life is no where near where it could be on the fun scale of life.

Side Story: I get a text from Jeff Kirk and Chris Day asking if I would like to go “surfing”. As you can imagine I thought this was a joke and I was instantly home sick. But to my surprise, they were totally serious! So last summer these wonderful guys took myself, Chad Ashcraft, Matt Toyer, and Kelly Hendricks @blastkelly out to wake surf on Geist! Epic epic day, so good for my soul and just so you know both Matt Toyer and Kelly Hendricks are pros at wake surfing!

Through this group I was also introduced to a couple city officials and was given a great view of how the local government is really supporting the local businesses and especially startups. For those of you that don’t already know this, you are all freakin blessed! My local government in California basically kicks the small business out and provides very little support. All of this was a 45 day ride for me that brought me to the conclusion that Indy was where I needed to move my company… all of it. Now some of you might know that even if you are a CEO, it doesn’t mean you call all of the shots.  I pushed for about a year and as of a month ago the board decided to close the Indy office and move everything back to California.  The board wanted me to move back California. I can tell you a year ago this would have been a hard decision, but last month, it was a five minute decision that went like this, (in summary of course)

“Coffey we would like for you to come back to California”

My response, “Hold on one second… hey love (that’s my wife), they want to move everything back to California and for us to go back as well. I personally think Indy has the TIPPING POINT FACTOR and it’s time for us to place our stake in the ground here… you ok with me resigning and selling off my side of the company so we can stay here for a while?”

Wife’s response, “do you really believe this is the place?”

Me again, “YES!”

Wife, “then do it!”

Me again, “hey board, I will help you through this transition but I am staying here.”

As you can imagine, this was a huge step of faith for us and at that time I did not have a plan as to what we were going to do. As the story unfolded, on a Thursday night I let my contacts here know I was staying.  Friday morning Cloran asked me to come down to DeveloperTown to talk with him and some of the team (Shout out to Mike Kelly goes here).  One week later I decided to come on board and I will tell you that I could not be happier and from my vantage point, I could not be in a better position to be a part of the TIPPING POINT that will happen here in Indy.

So let’s talk about this TIPPING POINT. Here is what I see:

Growth in Mindshare deciding to stay – I can’t tell you why or how this happens but it’s one of those macro economic shifts that you can see when a generation leaves for the coasts, gains amazing experience, and then decides they want to come back home. If you look around this city you will be able to list names of people here that have done this and have started companies that are now attracting young minds to stay after college.

Deal Flow – because of the above, the amount of deals and extremely good ideas that I have seen here over the last year has convinced me that Indy has a huge potential to make a name for itself in not only measured marketing but also in tech. Simply go to a Verge event, follow Matt Hunkler @hunkler and you will see what I mean.

Desire for a shift or diversification in investments to happen – We are seeing more and more investors want to diversify their portfolio into the tech space but are looking for ways to verify the options. We have some great IPOs which will birth new young investors that understand this space. We need to keep both the ideas and the money HERE!

Cost of living – I must say that the quality of life due to this is amazing for someone coming from California. This is extremely attractive and Indy is proving that it’s a city that can be enjoyed. Once again, hats off to the local community and government.

Family Focused – Hands down one of the best places to raise a family.

In short here is the map that I see:

Due to Mindshare coming back we are seeing great IPOs take place which will infuse capital that can be used as startup fuel which will keep the mindshare needed to grow this city!

Now here are my concerns. Even though people are getting excited and these shifts are starting to take place we still need to find a way to fund companies in between the friends and family round and “A” round founding. This needs to happen quickly.

I do love seeing people like Chris Day trying to rally with individuals to do this. I love seeing new companies like LocalStake @localstake focusing on crowd sourcing. (By the way, the guys over at LocalStake are great guys and if you don’t know what crowd sourcing is… look it up now!) BUT I also am seeing some of your big VCs on the coasts start to focus on this level of investment in cities like Austin, Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and even Indy.

With that said, I believe that this city has what it takes to really be a hot hub for startups. I believe in DeveloperTown and the team that exists within these houses. I believe that both the startup entrepreneur and the investment community need a solid accelerator and development house like DeveloperTown that focuses on guiding startups through the pain of building a tech company from concept to market push. I believe in our local government and its support, which we just saw last week as Mayor Ballard spoke here on his view of 2012 for our city. I believe in all of us!

So as I was driving home last night, a great song by Jon McLaughlin @jonmclaughlin called Indiana came on my Pandora station. If you haven’t ever heard the song, it’s worth the $.99 but there is a line that simply says, …”It’s probably best I stay in Indiana”. Three weeks ago I said, it’s probably time I set my stake in Indiana. I will tell you that since I made that decision, I have not been more excited for this city.

Rise From The Middle!

*disclaimer – if I didn’t mention you and you know you have been influential in my life, don’t worry there will be more blogs! Seriously, Kyle @kyleplacy and Mason @jmasonhughes you will get love very soon in your own blog!:)

Coffey @coffeyhouse

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Posted in Clients, How we work, IndyStartupScene | 8 Comments »

Will all my MidWest starters…please stand up

Posted April 19th, 2012

So, you may have heard that the Mayor held his State of the City address here at our Town earlier this week. There was a lot of tweeting, liking, recommending, linking, socializing, and hubbub about this. We flooded the streams there for a while, because if you are plugged into the indianapolis startup tribe you saw a steady trending of coverage on every medium. During the monitoring of this coverage on Twitter, at one point I laughed out loud at a local fellow member of the tech entrepreneur tribe’s tweet “Anyone hear when or where the state of the city address was? Can’t believe I haven’t seen anything about it.” Gotta love some good sarcasm. :-)

This got me to thinking about why this is such a big deal. Being a Townie, I am ecstatic anytime we get to show off what we have done, what we do, and what we are capable of doing, for obvious reasons, but mainly because I truly believe in our overall vision and goals. But, if I wasn’t a Townie, I am pretty sure I would have still been geeked by the symbolism of the event. Symbolism that embodies what DT is about, but is much, much bigger than us.

The story of our tribe, our way of thinking, almost feels like an underdog story…

…there we are, lowly tech geeks that don’t  quite fit in with mainstream thinking

…crazy dreamers, being laughed at, because of our childish aspirations for something different

…questioners of the status quo, being ridiculed because we don’t adhere the popular model of what a productive citizen is supposed to be.

…backwards YeeHaw MidWesterner’s that should be leaving the heavy lifting to the coasts

 

Events like this, show that we are geeks, and damn proud of it. We do dream, and dream big, because dreams are what inspire innovation and forward movement in every field…we have proven this time and time again. We couldn’t live without our unfading pursuit of something better than what we have been sold. And, though we respect, and are thankful what the Coasts have done for tech, entrepreneurship, and small business in general; our Mid West swagger is now a world-class force to be reckoned with.

 

So, again, even though we were honored to host it, I don’t think this event was specific to any one company. It was symbolizing a revolutionary rise in an entire culture, a new way of thinking, a tribe the has been, and will continue doing amazing things. We all should be proud of what we accomplished, and allow recognition like this to give validation to those crazy late nights, to that extra TDD effort that produced some bad ass code, to that one in a billion design that you had the balls to put out there even though it may have been laughed at, to the sweat blood and tears that we have all put into moving this engine we call the #IndyStartupScene forward.

 

Without the entire tribe’s collective efforts there would be no DT, no SpeakEasy, no IPO’s coming out of our proud city. So to all of my fellow starters out there, kudos to you, stand up, take a bow, and let’s keep this thing going!

 

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Posted in Events, How we work, IndyStartupScene | 3 Comments »

My First Month at DeveloperTown…

Posted April 9th, 2012

“You do what?”  That is usually the first question I hear when I try to explain to people what I do.

“Wait, you work in what?”  That is the most common question I get when I try to explain my office environment.

“That’s Awesome!”  That is usually the follow up response when I am finished explaining my job at DeveloperTown.

And that is exact reason why I started working at DeveloperTown a little more than a month ago.  It truly is an awesome place to work.

I graduated with a marketing degree, and like many people who are fresh out of college with a marketing degree, my options for what I could pursue were almost endless.  I could have done sales, communications, analysis and probably 10 other things with my degree, but fortunately enough I ended up working for a small robotics start up located in Indianapolis, IN.  For four years I honed my skills into what I really believe marketing should be about: developing a great product that meets real needs.

Digby at DeveloperTownWhen it was time for a change in jobs, I was fortunate enough end up at a place that has the same desire that I do: to build great products that meet real needs.  In my first month at DeveloperTown I have done more and learned more than I could have imagined.  Not only have I gotten involved with four different start ups helping shape their vision and product through design, but I have been given the opportunity to get my hands dirty and learn Ruby on Rails and Haml for building out the sites.

By no means do I claim to be a developer.  In fact, if any real developer looked at my code, I think they would vomit a little inside.  But the great thing about DeveloperTown is that everyone is open and willing to help you learn.  The one thing that I have learned is that everyone wants to help you out.  I just pop on over to another person’s house, knock on the door and am invited in.

I am excited about what the future holds.  I couldn’t imagine anything better than working in a start up that is helping build other start ups.  Plus, who doesn’t love to bring their dog to work.

Posted in How we work, Why houses? | 6 Comments »

Titanium Dev…The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly [The Ugly]

Posted February 8th, 2012
This is the sixth (and final) in a series of posts by DeveloperTown Associate Partner Andrew Robinson.

Start from the beginning with “We can create an app for that!”

We have reached the end of this blogging mini-series…but, don’t cry, because we will finally hear the Ugly truth about native mobile development, specifically with the Titanium platform.

The ugly truth is that delivering is the most important thing for the world that we at DeveloperTown thrive in. We cater to the agile-minded/lean-thinking starter community, which cherishes shipping quality product out of the door and iterating over the solution using real-world data and feedback from the people who matter most…yep, you guessed it…the actual Users. The productivity and speed to market gains you achieve when using Titanium make it a no brainer in most situations. There has been some ugly press about performance issues, or bugginess within the Titanium platform, but the bottom line is that Titanium greatly helps you ship a quality product, and it is getting better everyday.

So, we have taken the long way around, but we have finally landed on the Beautiful Truth that Titanium’s foundation in JavaScript, its clean and improving framework, and the excited community surrounding this platform, makes it a very good tool to use while building your art. Combine this with today’s power that comes with having your product/service available in an app store, and the wonderful dedication that our tribe has with shipping, it solidifies the reasons why you can consider building that new app as a native mobile app.

Regardless of what you choose to build with…please…don’t spend forever researching the pros and cons…see that fork in the road, make a decision, build it, and ship it out of the door!!!

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Titanium Dev…The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly [The Bad]

Posted February 6th, 2012
This is the fifth in a series of posts by DeveloperTown Associate Partner Andrew Robinson.

Start from the beginning with “We can create an app for that!”

No need for intros, lets get right to it…the bad parts of Titanium development.

Earlier in this series I hinted at the biggest bad there is for Titanium and any other abstraction platform…dependency. You are dependent on those guys out in Mountain View to stay as current as possible with the hardware platform upgrades. You are dependent on their quality assurance, and if they have bugs, you have to have workarounds. You are dependent on their existence…if they decide to give it up, you may be completely stuck, having to rewrite your app using the native platforms development environments anyway.

Appcelerator as a company has only been around for about 5 years on top of the native-native platforms being young as well; you are left with a fairly immature experience. I have run into inconsistencies, just plain inexplicable weirdness, and something’s that for all intents and purposes simply don’t work at times. There is a decent community that is excited about the platform, but Titanium is iterating so quickly it is hard to tell when the responses are stale. I semi-like the Stack Overflow-ish system they have put in place for the community, but again you get inconsistent results depending on what you are looking for.

Finally, there is debugging and optimizing your application. Debugging for the most part is a very good experience. It is only when you run into an issue that doesn’t seem to be caught by the debugger, when you are even aware of the veil that is covering what you are writing and the actual native platform underneath. When this happens you have to resort to incomprehensible logs from the device, or just trying different solutions until you get it working. It doesn’t happen often, but often enough to know that the platform is still in it’s growing pains period. As for optimization, I am referring mostly to memory optimization, which can seem to be a bit of a mystery. I am confident that the memory issues that you may read about from the early days of Titanium are being resolved and improved upon in every release. However, for very process intensive areas of your application, you may be tempted to dive into the native, especially if you are only targeting one of the stores/marketplaces.

If you are completely turned off by Titanium after reading this post, please re-read “The Good”, and wait on me to post “The Ugly”, where I try to summarize how I feel about the entire experience before you pass judgment.

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