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!

We’ve been working hard to update the identity of Flatsourcing.com over the last month since Peter and I got back from Russia.

We’re trying to continue to narrow our focus on what we do best and what best serves our clients.  That is:

• Retainer-based Contracts - we want to be aligned with our clients, and we feel like bidding on RFP’s and traditional contract structures put us at odds with our clients by reducing our ability to build anything they want in an agile way.  We’d rather just get on board in a low-risk month-to-month retainer with you.  Of course, we know you need to estimate things, so we can provide you a basic man-month estimate on how long we think something will take.
• Working with Technical Clients - we work best with startups and web design firms, not end users. We like it when we are managed in a very granular way.  The more experienced you are, the greater the likelihood for success.  Let your CTO or lead developer manage our developers, and we’ll do the heavy lifting.
• Strong Agile Processes - We’re moving from simplified project management in Basecamp to more granular ticketing or story-based approaches with Trac, Lighthouse, Pivotal Tracker or Jira with our clients.  We also will participate in daily standups via Skype chat or voice.  To top it all off, we’ll produce daily & weekly management reports, so you can track productivity. Whatever you use, we will learn.  A strong system begets great results.

To that end, we’re updating our identity to better reflect who we are today.  Here’s a stab at what you’ll be seeing on our homepage soon.

Our clients are start-ups and web design firms. If you’re looking to grow, we should talk.

We work the way you do, using modern tools and an agile methodology. Our process is different with every client, and once we get it down together, it flows like clockwork.

The more technical you are the better, we love being held to the highest standards for code quality. Why not put us to the test right now?

So, whether you’re a start-up looking to build a rapid prototype or scale an existing app, or a web design firm that needs a programmer working on multiple projects at once, we’re ready to go to work.

Together with our clients, we’ve built:

• Facebook applications with millions of users
• Award-winning analytics software
• Front-end design for major e-commerce site

Our proudest achievements are true collaborations with our clients. If you’ve got great UI design and know what you want your app to do, we’ll get under the hood and build it. Let’s get to work together.

I was very privileged to get the opportunity to moderate a panel at SXSW in Austin last week.  Our topic was Outsourcing 2.0 - Is the World Flat or Not?

My fellow panelists were Andrea Azril from Star Tech Global, Sandeep Sood from Monsoon Company and Matt Tritico, a developer in New Orleans working for LSU.

We had a very lively discussion about working with overseas teams, focused on the trade-offs and lessons learned through the work we’ve done.  Frankly, we expected a more politically focused discussion with the world economic crisis and job losses in the US.  However, the audience was a very sophisticated audience, much more focused on learning the in’s and out’s of outsourcing than scoring political points.  As I’ve mentioned to people I’ve discussed the political sensitivity of outsourcing with, in other parts of the world they don’t call it outsourcing, they call it competing.

The video from our talk is below.  I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Special thanks to Andrea, Sandeep & Matt for making it such a great panel and the Net2NO crew for all their support.

It’s been a week since TC50 and I’m finally getting around to blogging about the experience.  It was quite a week, and I was really grateful to Gerard Ramos, a long time friend, for taking a couple days off work to come to the conference and represent Flatsourcing.

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.

We’re thrilled to be launching the new Flatsourcing Dashboard at the TC50 DemoPit. We’ll be in the DemoPit tomorrow, and are will be doing it up New Orleans-style with Mardi Gras beads and bottles of Tabasco.
It’s been a lot of work getting the new Flatsourcing Dashboard ready for launch. Oleg, Alex and Timur have been working really hard to get everything prepped. We’ll be releasing it to all clients next week.

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.