codevader

Well the Talkies.de project is wrapping up and I’ll be moving on to other work now. Also my team will be going their own ways. Its easier for me to find projects for one developer (me) than for several. Perhaps Codevader will grow again in the future.

To continue following Maurício’s hugely informative posts, do so at http://codeshooter.wordpress.com/. I’ll continue blogging here, but typically my posts will be short and sweet

This blog has been really quiet lately as we’ve been in the home straight for launching Talkies. Finally, we went live on Sunday night.

Talkies is now up at http://www.talkies.de. In case you don’t speak German, and the pictures don’t give it away, Talkies is a social-networking site focused around movies, movie stars and the entertainment biz. Obviously aimed at German-speakers.

We’ve got exciting things planned for the site. What you see now is only the start!

Running Codevader for the last year has been really exciting and we’ve worked on some great projects with some awesome clients. One of those clients was a startup that has now hired the entire Codevader team, including myself.

So Codevader will not be taking on any more work. If you find your way to the Codevader website because you’re looking for a team to build you something, contact me anyway, since I know many other developers who are always looking for work.

What happens to CustomerFu? We’re licensing CustomerFu to Joerg Diekmann at These Lovely Days. He’ll be relaunching the site in the near future and will be operating it thereafter.

Our startup will be launching in public beta in November. We’re keeping the Codevader blog to post about Ruby and Rails stuff as we work on the project. The new project will also have its own non-technical, business-focused blog.

This blog has been really quiet for the last few months while all this was going down, but we hope to get back to more regular posting.

So the first question all my tech mates ask me when I tell them about CustomerFu is “So, its like a ticketing system?”

Sort of, but not really. CustomerFu is designed around the customer, not around a “ticket”. Customers are real, tickets are not. All complaints in the system are strongly tied to the customer that made them. There are no complicated ticket numbers to reference complaints with. You want to find a specific complaint? Then find the customer that made the complaint.

Why did we take this approach? Firstly, tickets are impersonal and hide the fact that this is a real customer you’re dealing with, with a real complaint. Secondly, outside tech and big business, the ticket terminology has far less traction. As a customer I don’t log a ticket with your company, I complain. I want my complaint sorted out and I don’t care how you track it. And don’t involve me with your internal terminology.

A quick heads-up on a product we’re launching soon. CustomerFu (www.customerfu.com) is an online tool for companies to manage customer complaints.What happens in many companies - when they’re small, its easy enough to follow up complaints through a paper-based system, or spreadsheets. But if your complaints are being received by more than one person in your organisation, or you have more than one branch or office, things quickly get out of hand. Bigger companies would start up a call-centre, or outsource to one. But that’s an expensive exercise.So CustomerFu will provide a centralised tool for companies to manage all of their customer complaints, making sure that none of them go amiss, and that every complaint is dealt with properly. Without breaking the bank.We’re in the home straight with development, so more information soon

2008 has rolled along and we’re wrapping up a few projects and getting started on some exciting new ones.

One of our big focuses for the year is to simplify. We’re narrowing the focus of what we do to make sure that we can do it well. The biggest casualty of this is our hosting business which has grown slowly but surely over the last few years, to the point where it is a major distraction at times. Coding is what we’re good at, so coding is where we want to spend our time.

In the next few months we also plan to have launched the first of our own products, which is something we’re really looking forward too.

To keep this blog active, we’re going to have our whole team blog here.

Some short introductions then…

• Nick (me): I steer the ship, communicate with clients and partners, project manage, do some architecture and whatever programming I can fit in between those things
• Grant: Almost a year-and-a-half Rails experience, and did PHP before that.
• Ivor: An engineering graduate with just over a year’s Rails experience. Previous experience with Flex and Actionscript, amongst other things.
• Robin: Only 6 months with Rails, but more than a year with C# before that. He’s also done enough Python to decide that he prefers Ruby.

We’re a small company. 4 people. And we plan to keep it that way - we see 6-7 people as the maximum size that we’d ever like to grow to.

A lot of the time we pitch against one-man shows. We obviously can deliver a better set of resources than most one-man operations, but we’re still small so we’re pretty responsive and able to give personal attention.

Then sometimes we pitch against bigger software development companies. They range from 30-200+ programmers. What do you get from them? Solidity for one. Mostly big companies aren’t going to disappear overnight. But you also become just another client.

“Basically a small company has a flavor to it, whereas a big company is sort of like checking into the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It’s a nice hotel but it has 5,000 rooms, so don’t expect anybody to remember your name. A small company is more like a bed and breakfast. You’re going to have a great time because you get along with people and it’s a much friendlier experience. You don’t really mind that the bathroom is down the hall because the people made a special vegetarian meal for you and then showed you around town. On the other hand, you might be at a bed and breakfast where they have weird leather implements and lots of cats.”

– From A Conversation with Joel Spolsky in ACM Queue.

We like small.