Wildbit

I started working at Indy Hall almost two weeks ago. Indy Hall is a coworking space in Old City, Philadelphia where people who would normally work at home can now work in an office with like-minded people. It’s a great concept. Right now I am in the evaluation stage, so I wanted to share my thoughts.

Wow, I came into our Beanstalk chat room today to check in. To my surprise, I had already talked to someone in the room and was really rude about it. Someone entered the room as “Chris N” and pretended to be me, then continued to be a complete ass to the poor customer. Here is a screen shot. Maybe some “official” member marker would be useful for these scenarios in open rooms? Dan, if you see this, please get in touch. So sorry.

This week Ilya Sabanin officially starts at Wildbit as a full-time employee. If you are familiar with our team, you will notice the name seems familiar. Ilya is Dmitry’s brother, and a damn good coder. We’re really exited to have him on the team. Ilya has already had some influence on our projects, which you can see from the Beanstalk Help Center, Beanstalk Harvest Integration, and The Viddler API RubyGem. He will be mainly helping with Beanstalk and our latest client project, which will will announce soon.

I’m a huge fan of paper sketches. They are the best way to get your ideas out in front of your team and clients before jumping into mockups or HTML. In most cases, the high level items can be decided on paper sketches, leaving the details to the mockups.

I usually draw sketches with a thin tipped sharpie on some printer paper, then scan or take a picture of it and upload. Over the years I have tried the digital options like Wacom tablets, but I could never get a consistent or satisfactory result. Until now, of course.

This week we released a RubyGem for Viddler’s Video API. We created it for our Beanstalk help system so we could upload video in each post, then pull back the player code to embed screen casts. This way we avoid multiple steps and we can manipulate how we present the video and video previews.

We’re working on a new project, with a new client. Starting with a new client is always delicate. There is a short period of dating before things get comfortable and fluid. We are pretty careful when deciding to work with a particular client. Things like project type, team size, client experience, mindset, and an overall fit for the project based on our skills are important, very important. We prefer to work with smaller teams since it fits our fast paced iterative process and allows us to make decisions quickly.

Although Eugene loves OmniFocus, I am partial to Rememberthemilk.com. I knew about the service a long time ago, but only found it useful within the past month or so. The latest version of the app is pretty close to perfect for my needs. I’ll tell you why…

On Monday, April 14th around 2am EST we will be moving to our new home at Engine Yard. We expect anywhere from 30 minutes to one hour of downtime while we transfer the final data to the new servers.

This is an ongoing effort to improve stability and performance. We feel confident that the experience and infrastructure at Engine Yard will help us get there.