No, no we do not move our office anywhere and don’t immigrate. Siberian woods in front of our office windows are too beautiful site to move from and the bears we usually feed on our way to work, would feel too lonely without us. Our Java development team simply decided to choose Liferay Portal over JBoss Portal for our Java projects and thus we migrate our current projects. And here are the reasons... read more →
Taking advantage of the new LinkedIn feature – LinkedIn Answers – we published a small poll there, asking about preferences in software outsourcing. We consider the best answer is by Shimon Keren, as it reflects our views: I have used fixed price for projects in two scenarios. The first was small scale projects where the likelihood of frequent requirements changes was low... read more →
Martin Fowler, “author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development” described his experience with offshore development and using agile practices, which we apply in most our projects, as follows: “For the last four years ThoughtWorks has operated a lab in Bangalore India to support our software development projects in North America and Europe. Traditional approaches to offshore development are based on plan-driven methodologies, but we are very firmly in the agile camp. Here I discuss our experiences and lessons learned in doing offshore agile development. So far we’ve discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate.” Let me express my opinion about practices he described... read more →
Another aspect of our life on holidays is an opportunity to visit different concerts, exhibitions and shows. Our long-term clients might remember our site with pictures and phrases from a book about Van Gogh. Another painter inspiring our creative abilities is a well known showman of the 20th century, who adored provoking people with his eccentricity. Of course, it’s Salvador Dali, whose exhibition is now on display at the Novosibirsk State Art Museum... read more →
For all of us trying to have their chakras balanced, minds organized and presentations visualized – a great resource: A periodic table of visualization methods – what can be more brilliant?!... read more →
Many of our customers and partners from western world may be very curious about our long holidays and come with the question ‘What do Russian Programmers do on New Year holidays?’ That’s right, we do celebrate much more about New Year and less about Christmas. We had 10 days off and usually I (and our other people) spend this on:... read more →
On 28 December I had a very-very long day. In fact, it started on 27 when at night we had a sound record session for our NY party’s corporate movie. In fact, it was a popular Russian cartoon called ‘Winter in Prostokvashino’, and making the movie implied cutting off some parts and adding our voices and songs. We finished about 1am at night, but it was fun trying to get into rhythm of actors of the cartoon. So next day I started early by interviewing everyone in our company (or tried to get everyone) about last year results. I had prepared a questionnaire and wrote down every answer which was really important... read more →
A few days ago I got a good email from our large customer with big thanks to the team - after a lot of efforts we got a version for a specific platform, and it completed a large development cycle. It’s always good to get respect for our work, but we here in Russia can say ‘your thanks is not gurgling’. You may know Russians like to drink Vodka (and other strong beverages) and gurgle is a sound when you pour out from the bottle… so when you hear something like that it means that good words can be also be supplied with some gift or ‘magarych’. So I tried to explain the customer that the team may deserve something more than just a grateful email. After a day our customer came back and asked me about a few details, and then within an hour we received a good Christmas bonus for everyone of the 8 people from the customer’s project team... read more →
You probably know how people love to compete with each other? All those machos out there are always discussing whose muscles bigger, legs stronger and etc. Among science geeks the discussion is usually held about whose brains are better in this or that scientific field, that’s why they produce so much scientific papers each year. Well, that sort of competition could not left out our developers as well. So we decided to show you, dear reader, that among our IT crowd there are also machos-developers, who love to test their wits on the website, famous by its test conducted among professionals in many fields, called Brainbench... read more →
We’ve become number 4 at Elance.com in the rating of earnings for the last 6 months. All Elance providers... read more →