Kodify - Together we Enjoy Agile MADNESS

Over the last few weeks we've been getting into sync as a team and I could not be happier!

Our first project was shipped over 2 months ago now and we're nearly ready to ship our next big project. In future posts I'm hoping to cover the more technical aspects of some of our projects but today we're going to be discussing something much more important - the human aspect.

Right now our little family consists of:

2 backend developers: Natxo & Tomoki

1 frontend developer: Liliana

1 agile coach: Fernando

1 P.O: Me (Rodney)

I think it's fair to say we've all really enjoyed the last few months. We've almost shipped two projects now and have learnt a ton from each other and to top it all off it's been FUN!!

Given how valuable we perceive this to be Fernando suggested that we should do an exercise to determine what is at the core of this success and how can we ensure that we maintain or strengthen it.

Values Exercise

We were each given a list of between 40-50 values and had to choose the 10 that were most important to us individually. We each then posted the results on the whiteboard in order to try and identify any common themes.

As it turns out there was a big overlap (maybe that's no surprise??)

In no particular order we identified the following values as important to us:

Learning

Fun

Excellence

Flexibility

Team Work

We also identified some "anti-values" that we should look out for within the existing team or new potential candidates that would have a negative impact.

Although a new team member does not have to have all 5 of these core values in order to join kodify, we should be extremely careful when considering any applicants with any of the "anti-values" we identified.

Does this mean we only accept those that fit match the 5 attributes perfectly? No. Confucius has good advice here…

“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” CONFUCIUS.

Two interesting slidedecks I went through this week as part of the research on this subject:

The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a company we love

http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-creating-a-company-we-love

Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility:

Last year at SearchLove in London I was lucky enough to catchup with Wil Reynolds, founder at SEER Interactive, an amazing SEO company based in Seattle.

As an entrepreneur it is very useful to model your strategies on previous successes, over the years I've been very grateful to Wil for sharing his insights and lessons learnt over on http://wilreynolds.com/ - and there's one concept he's been pushing recently that really resonates with me.

#RCS - Real Company Shit

What does this mean? As far as I can gather it's based on the premise that you'll ALWAYS come out on top if you adopt a long term strategy that is not easily copied or automated. If you are honest, transparent and truly care. Over the years SEO's have became (in)famous for some of their strategies to try and game the search engines. Thankfully things are finally changing and the search engines are able to detect and handle these situations.

Along those lines today we released our first bundle for Symfony2 - https://github.com/kodify/DownloaderBundle (a simple bundle to handle downloads)

As a brand new company it's very important that we focus on the most important tasks at hand and ship as much "value" as possible in the shortest timeframes possible, so why would we bother to put our efforts into open-sourcing code we're working on? Let me give you a rundown of some of the benefits:

It produces a sense of pride and ownership within the team.

Most of the technologies we use are opensource. We're giving back to the Symfony2 community - our core applications are based on this PHP framework and is critical to everything we do.

It forces us to adhere to good software development rules & best practices. When you know your code is going to be open to public scrutiny you're much more aware of the final commit. Symfony2 requires that we use PHPUnit to ensure good TDD

It helps recruitment. A players like to work with A players. If you have good technical talent within your team (and you should!) why not show it off? Point a potential candidate to your organisations github account and let them decide if that's the sort of environment they want to work in. Plus it gives you street cred.

If other people use it they may contribute bug fixes or additional features - FOR FREE!!

Still not convinced? Checkout http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html for even more reasons

As I see it - how can we afford not to?

So go ahead...

Job Description You will become part of a small pure SCRUM team, receiving software requirements from our Product Owner, who is at the same time CEO and part of our small 4 people team. As part of a SCRUM team, where the developers are “specialist generalist”. Initially you will be focused on desktop/mobile/tablet frontends but you will be required to grow in other parts of the development process, such as automated acceptance testing, or symfony 2 php development, according to your desired growth and company needs. Please note that personal skills are required for this position. You will be running a key role, not only coding by yourself but also assisting your team and collaborating with external partners. You will be part of decision taking, and continuous improvement, as usually on every SCRUM team, which means that we are not looking for someone with a passive attitude. You will also join our continuous training program, pushing our department with your deep knowledge and interest, leading internal and external courses like the rest of the team. You will frequently write technical articles in our internal wiki and assist/encourage your team writing technical documentation and articles. Desired Skills & Experience Must:

3 years experience as a Frontend Developer, most of it doing JavaScript Event-driven development.

an overwheling desire to create the best possible user experience

jQuery / PrototypeJS , JavaScript event-driven development , Ajax

the ability to work collaboratively across disciplines (IA, strategy, interaction design, code) and ideas about how to grow intersections between them

a powerful intellectual curiosity

a strong sense of craftsmanship

Desirable:

git (you will be working with your own development environment and be expected to make your own pull requests)

experience and clear concepts about caching strategies

experience working under TDD / BDD methodologies

experience using twitter’s bootstrap, CoffeeScript, LESS, CSS 2/3

experience developing under Symfony 2 PHP framework

experience applying SEO directives

Conditions:

Salary: 24.000€ to 30.000€ subject to experience

Based in our offices at Rambla Catalunya, you will be offered a fixed contract from the day 1

Flexitime

Ticket restaurant

Continuous training program

Private medical insurance

Half day off on your birthday

It’s been an intense few weeks here at the new office but I’ve finally found some time after our first retrospective to put down some thoughts and share what we’ve been working on as I’m personally really impressed with everything we’ve achieved in these short first 8 days.

The first and most important announcement are the first 3 team members:  Tomoki Kamo Mora, Natxo Treig (Senior Analyst Programmers) & Fernando Palomo García (Agile Coach).

To say these guys are awesome would be the understatement of the century, all 3 have previous experience on projects like Groupalia, Privalia, Splendia & FancyBox and have worked as part of an agile team working on projects with high volumes of transactions using ATDD. I feel truly honoured that they chose to join kodify and only hope that myself and the project are able to fulfil their expectations.

To give you an idea on just how good these guys are and the sort of tools we'll be using I asked them to compile a list of items delivered during their first 8 days:

Setup development machines HP Z220 Workstation w/ Ubuntu

Setup Google Apps for everyone

Setup HipChat

Setup development environments using Vagrant (VirtualBox, Git, 64bits CentOs Linux distribution, PHP + PHPUnit + xdebug + xhprof installed and configured)

CI Server: Setup Jenkins using Vagrant also (builds are created and executed on every pull request and on demand. Typical parameters have been tuned: unit tests, coding style, mess detector, ….)

Github (repos for projects, service hooks to HipChat (notifies on pull requests, forks, etc.) & Jenkins)

Symfony2, Bootstrap,  Behat + Mink + SeleniumServer 2

Product: Product backlog Grooming, Planning first iteration, Create generic CRUD bundle to be used across first project

DELIVERY OF FIRST FEW USER STORIES!!!!

We've also had our first retrospective and plan to make our first few Symfony2 Bundles public over the next few weeks, keep an eye on https://github.com/kodify (transcoding bundle with a driver for pandastream and also the CRUD bundle).

Not bad for the first 8 days, eh? Can't wait to see what we can build in the next few months.

As we're booting up our engines I've been thinking more and more about the type of company culture that I'd like to emerge within our little family/team.

As an entrepreneur I've read many books and articles on this subject, here are a few of my favourites examples of companies that have created an awesome culture:

SEOmoz

I was recently lucky enough to have breakfast one-on-one with Rand Fishkin. Someone I've been following for many years now and admired.

When you don't know what to do...

That's when we find out how well you make decisions.

When you don't have the resources to do it the usual way, that's when you show us how resourceful you are.

And when you don't know if it's going to work, that's how we find out whether or not we need you on our team.

Over the past week we've been working on decorating the new space and preparing it for the new team.

I've been lucky enough to stumble across an amazing company focused on turning around a project on a tight budget by sourcing most of the furniture and accessories from IKEA and a few other key suppliers (Agile Interior Decoration??)

Vera and Miriam from http://www.iloftyou.es/ have done an awesome job of transforming this empty space into a cosy environment where creativity and productivity can flow.

We're still working on the kitchen, and missing the whiteboards, but I just wanted to get these photos up as I'm really happy with how it's all coming together!

Xmas came early at the office, woop woop!

I've finally managed to get our job offers posted on LinkedIn after a few days researching similar positions in Barcelona and abroad.

I've worked really hard to try and make the position as appealing as possible, there is so much potential in the project we'll be working on but it's fundamental to lay down that strong foundation that will allow for future growth.

We've already had a few applications come through, looking forward to meeting some of them in person!

Technical Lead

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4105095

Web Developer

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4104494

If you know of someone that might be interested, please forward them the details of the open position, thanks!

After a few days hunting we've managed to find an awesome office and HQ for our new project.

When searching for an office here were some of the main points we were looking for (actual list taken from the writeboard in our basecamp):

In no particular order:

Open plan (no offices or cubicles), room for up to 6 desks

1 meeting room for private conversations

Lots of natural light

Modernish/Not too dated

Heating/AC

Kitchenette

Space for whiteboards (although can get ones on wheels)

Not on a first floor. Something with a view

Well connected to main metro/bus lines + easy to find