As all global IT companies Flatsourcing faces factors that used to be difficult parts, but not in modern age! For example what if your company has several offices? Our company has two major offices in New Orleans (US) and Kazan (RU), not counting cities where other friendly development and management staff members are located.

What we do to stay connected like we’re in one company? We use IMs, web-cams, desktop sharing tools and social networks a lot. It probably becomes so common where you know about your own friend more not from sitting in same office room, but through facebook, for example. So knowing each others habit, birthdays, etc. is not a problem indeed! BTW recently have created flatsourcing facebook, and so we now have a fan club!

The main thing about having multiple offices is that each office has to have core staff, somebody who’s managing it all and unites the company offices! The info on the core staff of flatsourcing company, who’s managing its all aspects has been recently updated on the flatsourcing about page.

The sweetest part about our long successful global IT company experience is that just like we unite our company’s multiple offices, we’re also able to use those techniques with our partners and clients, so that we work with them just like they are part of our team (or we are part of their team)! And we really like to work with professionals! So everybody, let’s cooperate, and benefit from globalization, outsourcing, rather than suffer from it’s high competition factors!

How?

Focus on listening. The best way to improve any outsourcing relationship is to listen better and more often. Your developer likely spends long hours ingesting industry information in order to be better than his peers. We know you probably do too, but if your developer is voicing concerns about a project it’s likely warranted. Don’t let any concern go unanswered. Paying respect to a developer’s concern is a display of trust, which is the goal in any outsourced relationship. Be attentive and make sure your communication is clear. If you want a project to work right the first time, focus on providing good materials and listen, listen, listen.

Timur Vafin and me (Oleg Kurnosov) will be posting RubyOnRails-related articles here, for those who is not too much aware of it yet, here is what to start with:

So, decided to learn more about RubyOnRails and don’t know what to start with?

It seems that the most straightforward way - is to take some completed RubyOnRails-based project and dig into it, trying to understanding something.

However it’s wrong and dangerous parth….although it takes you to some kind of positive learning result (tryed it out already)

Instead it’s more logical to start learning RubyOnRails framework from learning the Ruby-language and basics. Following is a must to read:

• PickAxe
• it’s good to start with funny book Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (it also had Russian translation fortunately)
• For wikipedia fans

While learning, following will help you:

• Knowing Perl basic
  For example many get confused by the following construction:

  
  # surfed through the array of objects and collected new array
  out of .name, on-fly making it more hum (this is RoR)
  some_array.collect { |item| item.name.humanize }
  

• Understanding of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), i.e. not only understanding, but understanding that OOP is good
  It doesn’t really matter if you don’t know Perl and PHP, however it you don’t know why using OOP, it would be quite hard to figure out things. In fact, it’s very popular to develop using PHP procedures-way, isn’t?

When you learn the basics of Ruby, write couple of scripts, and then it’s the right time to learning the framework finally!

There is also a super-book Agile Web Development with Rails, where it’s also explained how to create a sample e-commerce application.

OK, now it’s time to dig into the code of RubyOnRails projects to learn from the others!

Hello Everybody!

After logo redesign I realized that the whole site design seems too dark and colors are not so pretty as logo has. So I applied more bright color scheme, used some components of new logo, created some icons, formatted blog posts and now presenting updated blog.flatsourcing.com design. Please let me know all your comments on that, I love constructive critics and would be happy to apply your comments!

Here it is:

Download full-sized version

Thank you.