We had a great time, and the show was fantastic.  Made some great connections.  Found new project management tools to work with which I always love.  And most of all, got some fantastic feedback on the Flatsourcing Dashboard.

We’ve been busy since the conference with all of the new clients that we brought onboard, and have been working hard to make sure they are all taken care of.

If you met us at TC50, please drop us a line to say hey.  It was a great week in San Fran.

Hurricane Gustav threw us a curveball this week and unfortunately Will Donaldson isn’t able to come along, but my good friend Gerard Ramos has stepped up and will be helping me out. I’m excited to spend time with the former local New Orleans developer who’s stepped up to the big leagues now in San Francisco.

Everyone has worked really hard to get the Flatsourcing Dashboard ready, and it is something that we’ve been thinking about for a while now. We felt a need for a central location for our clients to collaborate with us. But, we didn’t want to lock clients into a proprietary project management tool, we pride ourselves on working within existing project management protocol.

The Flatsourcing Dashboard (login:voodoo password:123456) accomplishes some of the things we feel are important when collaborating globally:

• Get to know your team with avatars
• Keep up on your project with a “news feed” of all communications in Basecamp or any other project management tools.
• Keep track of your contract and invoices all in once place.
• Get in touch with us in an emergency instantly and easily.
• Learn the best way to work with us with FAQ’s and a client manual.

All of this is in the Flatsourcing Dashboard, providing “outsourcing insight” to our clients and taking our services to a whole new level.

I’m so excited to be out here at TC50. If you’re in town and want to meet up, email me at cschultz@flatsourcing.com. Follow me on Twitter for updates. And watch TC50 streaming live.

We’re ready to grow, and we need your help! Over the last six months, Flatsourcing has expanding its client base significantly. We spend May and June recruiting and training new programmers in our Kazan office, and we’re ready to take on new clients.

We are so grateful to the folks that refer us business on a regular basis. You know who you are, and we appreciate it. To show our appreciation, we are formally launching our referral program. Starting today, anyone who refers a lead to us that ends up becoming a client, we’ll compensate to the tune of $250.

All you have to do is fill out the simple form located here.

Who should you refer to Flatsourcing?  Well, let me share a little bit about our business.

Flatsourcing specializes in integrating Ruby on Rails programmers into your development team on monthly contract basis.  We offer talented full-time programmers available on a month-to-month basis or for long term engagements.  Don’t have a development team yet? Start one with us.

Our clients range from startups building web apps to designer firms who want a programmer on staff to deploy their sites.

Ready to earn some pocket change?  Send us anyone you know who may be looking for Ruby on Rails programming.  We’ll keep you posted and when we close the deal, we’ll send you $250.

After the presentations, they opened the mic up for anyone to give 60 second elevator pitches for their companies.  Here’s mine:

60 Second Pitch for Flatsourcing from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.
For more info, visit the Big Summer Geek Out at sfnewtech.com.

In the world of professional web development it often takes 7 or 8 specialists to put together your website. The below image from business week is something I dug up from 2004. It describes some of the unique positions in our industry:

What does Flatsourcing do? We’re number 6, the foundation for everything. After your project is broken into hundreds of subproject tasks, we get it all done.

Long answer: Try to do anything with it for which it wasn’t built. Content Management Systems are built to be installed, not to be customized or tweaked to your needs. Sure, extensions are available, but they are built by an open-source community, so there is no assurance that they work. Want a headache really quickly? Try to do something with a CMS that it wasn’t designed to do.

CMS-systems, particularly open-source ones, like Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, and others are great. They aren’t proprietary and they are free. They are already developed, so you can just download the installer files and …voilà! you have a site in place. Upload your design, change the settings to fit your needs and you’re good to go. Instant website (almost).

We’ve been doing a number of CMS installs for clients lately. And through the experience of working with different CMS installs, we’re learning a lot:

• The functionality of a CMS better be what you need. - Don’t decide what you want your website to do and then try to make your CMS do it. It’ll never work. You can’t custom-code a CMS. Sure, you can add extensions and try different ones until you find one that does more or less what you need. But this is a long and arduous process. If you are going to use a CMS, understand the functionality and limitations of the CMS before you decide on it and deploy it. If it will work for you as its designed, then great. If not, don’t try to tweak it to fit your needs. You’re asking for headaches.
• Open source means no one owns it and lots of people built it. - There are a lot of moving parts, documentation may be limited, and customization may break it. Understand the ownership limitations of non-proprietary software. When your client says something isn’t working, is it because of the implementation or the programming? It doesn’t matter to the client, its just not working.
• Be prepared to deploy the many updates that open-source platforms require. - Very rarely is it a set it and forget it type of deal.
  
• Who ya gonna call? - When something goes wrong, or isn’t working, who built it? Your client is calling you. Who are you going to call?

Bottom line: Open Source CMS platforms are for implementing, not customizing. Make sure you understand the platform’s capabilities and its limits. If it fits your needs great, if it doesn’t, look elsewhere or build the software you need.

Photo credit: Mrs Maze

Welcome, Party for An Event Apart from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Today, finally A List Apart Magazine outlined there vision on new technologies. It’s easier to recommend technologies, when such finally does something to understand and re-group according to modern world tendecies!

Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails by Michael Slater

Getting Started with Ruby on Rails by Dan Benjamin

P.S. Flatsourcing have been working with RubyOnRails since 2005. We are among the first! And it’s the CTO of Flatsourcing, Timur Vafin who initially recommended RubyOnRails as additional and potentially main programming tool for Flatsourcing! A lot of skeptics including me didn’t fully understood the potential and future behind it! I do now for sure already since 2005! Also A List Apart does now too since 2008! Thanks, Timur!

The blackberry and the iPhone have essentially freed the sales force from rigid schedules and desk jobs. Workers become nomads, setting up meetings easily, selling when their is demand and planning when there is not. Chaining people to desks prevents the freedom of work-style and breeds a lack of motivation. We must motivate ourselves to do something great, as motivation is the only path to success. Easier said, if you’re hungry, you’ll find food.

Labor is now based on results and deliverables because management is mobile. After all, we’d all appreciate a more talented individual finishing the same job in less time.

At flatsourcing we provide web development services that free our clients from desks so that they can make more sales and more money. We implement this idea in our own staff as well. We work based on deliverables and satisfaction.

When you were in college, your professor said, “turn in a paper by Friday,” but didn’t care how or where you did it. Tomorrows workforce will be much the same: fidelity to the job not the desk.