Above all, the goal of our team is to provide the best possible service to the users. This team is one of the most highly regarded and most respected support teams in the community, with a reputation of being helpful, efficient and knowledgable. This is mainly due to the overriding attitude governing the way the team works. There is a genuine desire to provide the best level of support possible, and not the minimum that can be gotten away with.

Each member of the team is encouraged to be pro-active and use initiative whenever possible, and be always on the look-out for improvements – not only to the software systems but also in the processes followed to support them.

Queries and questions are always replied to promptly (never allowing more than half a working day without providing some sort of response), but are always well thought through, clear and as detailed as necessary. Often the answer to a question or problem will lead the team to make suggestions for better alternatives.

Software produced by the team is always well tested before it is released and where possible peer reviews are performed. Finally, knowledge is always shared amongst the team as much as possible.

1. Talk to the users / Fully consult the users;
2. Let user interface people and psychologists in there;
3. Let not have the engineers only have a say;
4. Get people who like what they’re doing. Have a core team of smart, motivated developers;
5. Take away budget pressure and let people do *good* and sustainable work;
6. Make them “own” their project. Give them responsibility.
7. Burn up all documents;
8. Find out use cases. Discuss them. Jot down drawings of all sorts of things on whiteboards. Take photos of that;
9. Use a big wiki thing for documentation;
10. Don’t implement features nobody wants because they are buggy and hard to understand;
11. Deliver often;
12. Have more chocolate;
13. No #13;
14. Etc.;
15. Make the system testable;
16. Test a lot / Automate testing where possible;
17. Work on the system in one team across contractors.
18. Have managers who understand software and give the developers time and space to do what they need to do;
19. Have enough money to sustain an environment where people don’t keep leaving (for example, like Google, encouraging people to start their own mini-business/project inside the company).

The biggest problem is that the people who pay for (and therefore control) the development work don’t have the opportunity to learn how complex the system really is, and assume that it can all be written in a week. It needs to be user-led, rather than imposed upon them from upon high.

Get a real idea of how/what the system is expected to do. And only then start thinking of what technologies are needed to implement it.

I must have learned something from the first chapter of The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas (who’s probably better known these days for his contributions to the Ruby community through his publishing company and must-have book Programming Ruby) when I read it long ago. In that chapter, Dave’s 8th tip is to, “Invest Regulary in Your Knowledge Portfolio”. One of the ways he suggests doing so is to learn one new language a year. Well, this year I seem to be making up for years gone by, because I’ve been spending a lot of my extra time working with several different languages and their frameworks. This year, I’ve been working with – in order as of today – haXe, Flash Lite 1.1, Ruby, ActionScript 3.0, XUL, and the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. I’ve been working with their frameworks Ruby on Rails, Flex, and XULRunner.

All of these languages are tools to build the kind of software that I’m interested in building: software that’s fun to write, easy to distribute, a pleasure to use, useful, and affordable. For software to be distributed easily and a pleasure to use has to be universally available. And, to be universally available it needs to be truly cross-platform – cross-software and cross-hardware. It needs to work on win, mac, and nix and also in a browser, on a desktop, and on a palmtop.

Originally published in assertTrue.

“When working together across both the design and programming disciplines, the best results and happiest clients are directly related to how well the (sometimes deceptive) design/programming companies work together. The best way to move forward and stay ahead of the game is to find a reliable partner, be it programmer or designer, that is willing to wear your hat and even go to meetings with you when needed. Once you develop a relationship, which most do eventually, it’s easy to get comfortable in your situation. This is one of the major reasons designers and programmers are so baffled by one another. No one interacts and shares knowledge, they just do their part and that’s it. This isn’t constructive enough to satisfy me, sorry.

Designers and programmers should be constantly looking into new ways to help each other out. And if you’re a small and growing company and have the demand, hire someone to compliment your team. Your designers will learn 100 times more information from an on-board programmer than emailing an outsourced “friend.” The same goes for programmers. Having one Graphic Designer on board could save you thousands in outsourcing, and teach your team priceless information about the layout in front of the code, and how the scripts manipulate what the user sees. Website interfaces should be designed for usability and accessibility, and that involves both what you see, and the programming that powers it. Make an effort to understand your complimentary discipline.”

Originally published in BittBox.

Nevertheless a higher value compelled us to say yes and that was the opportunity to share what we’ve learned so far, probably in the hope of helping other entrepreneurs that are wondering if starting a business with a partner (husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend) can work.

In the end it was a good exercise for us as well, since it made us meditate and digest our hard learned lessons in order to share it with others. The talk happened yesterday at Cowork Lisboa together with the Lisbon Startup Coffee.

Here are the screenshots:

Theme selector button on admin bar

Theme selector interface

It’s a really simple plugin but we think it improves the user experience quite a bit. By clicking on the theme it will automatically preview it on the right side in real time. After that if you like what you see just click Activate and you’re all set. It is inspired on Tumblr’s way of customizing appearance and together with the new Tumblr Importer in WordPress 3.3 we’re convinced this will come in handy.

WordPress plugin for selecting theme via frontend
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-selector/

“every business must rethink their on-line presence, they must rethink their web presence, making it more dynamic, more social, dealing with mobile applications to capture the attention as well as the spending in a crowded consumer market” – Shantanu Narayen

I’ll leave you with a few photos as well: