As we here at Flatsourcing are big fans of GitHub and recommend it as our code hosting repository of choice for most clients, I thought it would be worthwhile to pass along some info on their 2009 contest.

For your chance to win a bottle of 20 year old Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon AND a free large GitHub account for life, just follow their simple contest guidelines:

The contest is pretty simple. You download our sample data which includes a file containing which users are watching which repositories, and a file listing 4,788 of those users. Then you write a program to recommend up to 10 repositories for each of the test users. You get a point for each time one of your guesses was an entry we removed.

For more on the contest check out the official GitHub contest page.
For more information on how we use GitHub and our process, give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help.

We’re now trying to collect emails and dates of births of those who work within the company at least to congratulate them on birthdays with even more informal type of congratulations :) Stay tuned and let us know your contact info in case we ask, don’t worry :)

In some recent calls with prospective clients I seem to have spent some extra time discussing the benefits of our decision to focus on the Agile Development methodology. More and more people are beginning to understand the benefits of agile versus the time and effort spent in the past focused on scope documents, dense detailed project specifications, and trying to peek into the future so they can plan accordingly.

I’ve found that the simple 4 points found in the Agile Manfiesto help explain our choice and picque the interest of those unfamiliar with agile.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

While these 4 points get to the core of agile, there is also an understanding that all of the items on the right side are in themselves valuable, but only within the context of the greater goal of developing a meaningful end result.

Tools and process are very important, and if you would like to know more about ours, check out Chris’s post from earlier this week.

For more resources on Agile Development, check out the links below:

http://www.agilealliance.org/
http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html

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: +15043227657. 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.

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!