TWG is sounding the trumpets again.

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Tom Walsham has joined the TWG team. Tom brings an impressive array of product management and analytics experience to our team, and we couldn’t be happier at finding such a great guy to join us in our Mission to make TWG the best dev shop in the world for learning, working, creating and growing.

I met Tom over a year ago at the LeanCoffee meetups. Whenever he spoke I found myself nodding at his thoughtful contrarian views, finely structured arguments, and dashing flights into the esoteric. We arranged to have a pint together at the Foggy Dew to talk about English premiership football, the web, mobile, product development, and how we all strive to find that balance between a rewarding career, and a healthy family and social life. A couple of pints of beer in, he and I nodded sagely when we agreed that ultimately it’s the journey that’s the reward, and not the destination. And so, upon this foundation of profound Hallmark™ confucian truth, we decided to collaborate on a project to test our compatibility further. As luck would have it, things worked out exceedingly well, and so today we’re making it official that Tom is joining forces with TWG in our pursuit of product development virtue.

Tom’s an experienced product manager, marketing engineer, and analytics grand-master, all rolled into one handsome chap. The cherry on top is that he’s a great communicator and teacher. He comes from England to Toronto via Guatemala, joined by a wonderful partner, a beautiful daughter, and a fine dog. From an early start in coding BASIC on the BBC Micro at age 5 [10 PRINT "Matthew smells"\n20 GOTO 10] and writing games on the venerable Commodore Amiga he took that fateful detour through a Philosophy degree before getting back onto the technology train, working at Cambridge University. Among the many accolades that have been showered upon Tom (far too many to list here) I’d like to highlight a few of the non-technical ones:

1. Tom got Archbishop Desmond Tutu drunk at the University of Cambridge in 1999. Technically it was the wine that got Tutu drunk, but Tom was facilitating the evening.
2. Tom was repeatedly told to ‘get out of the way’ by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge in 2000.
3. Tom bootstrapped the Toronto Zombiewalk from 2004-2008
4. Tom is far away the most entertaining Karaoke singer in the Toronto tech scene.

But humour aside, we’re delighted to have Tom join us because he adds a great depth of experience in Product Management, specifically in driving product development decisions through the lens of user analytics. This will help our team continue to improve our own products like PostageApp, as well as the products that our clients ask us to design and build. Tom likes to say that the best data your app can tell you is what your users aren’t doing, and we think that this common blind spot  will now shrink and become a competitive advantage for us, because we now have his experience and the right tools to measure and act on it.

The good news at TWG doesn’t stop here! We also have two new amazing developers that we’ll be introducing to the Toronto scene later this week. Plans are in the works to host a Band and Karoke night, where friends and colleagues can come by to meet the new faces.

So stay tuned.. but in the meantime, please raise a glass to toast a great match – Tom Walsham with TWG.

When you love what you do, and who you are with, excellence will follow.

The #1 reason I adore coming to work every day is for the opportunity to work with an awesome team filled with smart, ambitious people who love what they do.

It’s a privilege I’ve been appreciative of every single day, week, month and year that I’ve been a partner at TWG, and today we’re celebrating a new team milestone: our first TWG’er, Dessy, is interviewing at Y-Combinator.

I know what you’re thinking, why would we be celebrating the fact that one of our developers might not be coming back from California?

But before I answer, let me muse on what makes a great developer.

In baseball, a five-tool player is someone who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, baserunning skills & speed, throwing ability, and fielding ability.

Players considered in this elite group have included Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Andre Dawson, and Duke Snider, as well as Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodrigues (in their primes).

At TWG, a five-tool developer might look like someone who excels at:

1. Architecture & Planning;
2. Back-end coding;
3. Front-end coding;
4. Mobile development;
5. Communication – with stakeholders (someone who speaks geek & client); and

But wait.. There’s more.

There’s a bonus sixth tool.

6. Closing. I repeat… closing. Finishing. Completing. Shipping. Done for real.

When you run a company that builds Internet based software, you dream of having a five-tool dev. Frankly, if you have developers who excel in 3 of these categories, you’re doing great, and you can build a very successful team. If you have developers who excel in 4 or 5 of these categories, you hope to work with them forever – trust me. But a legendary six-tool developer, now your in “pinch-me” territory.

Back to the celebration.

One of our rising stars, Dessy Daskalov is well on her way to becoming a six-tool developer. She tech leads her own projects; builds back-ends and front-ends; develops in Rails and iOS; takes the project management burden off Dom, Chris, Jeremy and me because she’s so good with our clients; and she gets shit done!

Dessy also finds time on evenings and weekends to build side project she’s passionate about. These talents and efforts helped her get in front of Paul Graham at YC, and we’re very proud of her.

A year ago, Dom and I realized that personal and professional growth can’t be treated like a zero sum game. The goal is always for both sides to benefit and succeed, even if that means someone has to move on (one day).

We don’t know whether Paul Graham will be accepting Dessy and her team to YC, but we do know that opportunities like that don’t come around for everyone, and we’re extremely proud of her, and supportive of her efforts.

Go Go Dessislava!

After 9 years of building great web applications, web sites, and system integrations for clients of every stripe, The Working Group (TWG) is expanding our service offering to include mobile application development.

Why are we getting into mobile?

Well, the truth is we’ve been doing it for a while. We launched our first mobile app about two years ago and have been developing them for select clients ever since. And for us, formalizing this into a full service offering just seemed like a logical progression given what we do: help organizations build and grow their business online.

Because right now it isn’t about web vs. mobile, it’s about combining the strengths of web and mobile together to help our clients get to where they want to be.  So we’ve decided to make it official and really put our backs into mobile application development.

Some New Faces at TWG:

We’ve brought on some great people to make sure our mobile application development is as strong as the web side of our shop. Chris Eben joined us in September as a managing partner and will be leading the business side of our mobile division.  We’re also privileged to have Jeremy Bower, formerly of Viigo and Polar Mobile, as our director of mobile development. Jeremy brings a wealth of dev chops to TWG, and will be tasked with building a world class team covering the major platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry and mobile web. Look for more information on Chris and Jeremy on this blog in the coming weeks.

Let’s Talk Mobile:

If you are thinking about developing a mobile app for your business, or if you just want to know more about our offering, please contact us at: 416.850.2500 /  info@twg.ca or checkout our mobile portfolio.

TWG is a digital agency of thinkers, designers, coders, and friends – lovingly crafting the internet since 2002.

We’ve partnered with TEDxToronto since year one because it personally reminds and inspires us to keep looking forward, and to keep getting better. Like TEDxTO, TWG works with people that want to bring great ideas into existence – that’s what excites us the most.

This year’s TEDxTO theme ‘redefinition’ resonates particularly well because we sense a paradigm shift happening within internet technology. We see the ‘internet’ continuing to be the primary information ‘network’, however we also expect the channels through which it is exposed and accessed to change radically in the next five years. PC-based ‘Web’ will be supplanted by mobile, tablet, console, and transmedia experience. If redefinition means changing our understanding and thus relationships to existing things, then we’re about to see that happen with the internet.

Redefinition is a challenge that every creative individual faces in their life; and in their career. So thank you TEDxToronto for inspiring and helping redefine TWG’s creativity.

Today’s Live Stream: http://live.tedxtoronto.com

Dom & Andrés talk TEDxTO in last year’s sponsor video:

Produced by: TheBizMedia.com

We <3 nerds, and we <3 the Toronto dev community, so on August 25th we hosted our second #nerdlearn panel. Since mobile is the future, we wanted to discuss what the future of mobile dev is with some respected members of the Toronto mobile dev community.

Jeremy Bower, Pearl Chen, and Jeff Zakrzewski did an amazing job describing mobile development today, and speculating on what the future will bring. They also tackled some tough questions thrown out by our amazing audience.

Jon Lim put his videography skills to good use the night of #nerdlearn:

We had some great conversation,

lots of audience participation,

and the necessities of all good dev events: mingling, beer, and pizza.

A huge thank you to our panelists and audience members, we can’t wait to have you back for the next one!

And he did it with flying colours.

Allow me to digress..

Interviewing Waterloo Co-op students can be an amusing exercise. Last winter, when I ran Waterloo phone interviews for most of the day, some prospects were extremely nervous and confused, to the point of being stumped by questions such as: ‘so why did you decide to pursue software engineering?‘ or ‘have you worked on any open source projects, or have you built a website before?‘.

It was astounding to me, that for all of their smarts, talent and ability, some were applying to work at a web development shop, but hadn’t yet explored the key technologies that are fundamental to it. So it was with great relief when I spoke with Chris and a few other applicants, who clearly had their shit together.

In the end, we ranked Chris at the top on our Waterloo Co-op placement sheet. He had the web development skills we were looking for, plenty of experience coding, and yes he had great reviews from previous employers, but what was key for us was his chill attitude and willingness to be flexible and adaptive to whatever might happen.

TWG is part client services web shop, part application incubator, part event space and beer hall. The projects we work on, applications we imagine, and things that happen here can change on a monthly basis. So it’s important that everyone here is willing to bend, but not break (young grasshopper).

Chris dropped his bag, pulled up a chair, and quickly got into the hang of things, rebuilding a data import and transformation system for one of our key clients. For some, this kind of work sounds pretty boring.. but I assure you the end result is certainly not. Chris’ tool has enabled tens of thousands of music tracks to now be accessible through a web-based platform where you can search them, filter them, sample them, and buy them. Chris also jumped into the Comfortable Mexican Sofa project – our own Open Source Rails CMS, and created a number of custom add-ons like a Polling system, and improvements to the Gallery system.

I know that this co-op term was a period of real growth in Chris’ life – in terms of his work here, his career, and in terms of his growth as a person (all great btw). We’re really glad to have had Chris work with us for the summer term, and we look forward to hearing about the amazing things he’s destined to do, and maybe even a visit here at the studio. Chris – we’ll have La Villa Strangiato cued up waiting..

As a small development shop or tech start-up, it’s tough to compete for the very best developers, designers and project managers. Create your own unique culture to build a team with common values and purpose.

At a recent LeanCoffee meetup here at TWG, we discussed company Culture, and how it can be a competitive advantage. We talked about how it’s sometimes difficult to attract and retain the best talent, about how it’s difficult to keep a work environment challenging and yet enjoyable during periods of rapid growth.

Together, we recognized that a company’s culture is the expression of the values and priorities of the people who make up your business.

For TWG, discovering our own culture, putting a focus on it, and having it become part of our work life has proven to be extremely beneficial.

–

Back in the mid 2000′s, finding great projects and top talent was the primary challenge for TWG. We discovered that by nurturing our own culture we were able to build a strong, cohesive and happy team, and that consequently, the quality of our work, led us to better and better projects.

Here’s the short list of some things we learned along the way:

Make your business more transparent in its finances and rewards.

Spend (splurge) on experiences that bring the team together.

Listen to your team, and keep them challenged with things they love.

Share the ownership and success with your team.

I’ll illustrate in more detail by going back through the series of events and decision points in our past that helped shape TWG’s culture, and what I believe has become a competitive advantage.

Jan 2005. Bonus time.

TWG was a tiny shop of 4, building web sites and basic web applications in PHP. We had a few small successes under our belt, but were still paying ourselves and staff far lower than market rates. After socking away about 3 months of reserves, we had about 18K left over. What to do?

The choice seemed obvious. I needed to respect the sacrifices that we were all making, and be transparent about our successes and failures to the team. It would build trust, and make everyone realize that truly nobody was making a buck off of the sweat of another. So we split up the bonus evenly between the team, and we had a Christmas with a fatter wallet.

The Lesson: Be transparent, and let the team know when there’s a profit to be shared by all.

Jan 2007. Vacation time

TWG had grown to a shop of about 7. We were still building websites and apps, but our costs were now significantly higher; we were paying our staff more, and we had a real office and real rent. We’d recently finished a successful project and we were sitting with about 12K surplus… not a huge amount. I could have sunk it back into the business, I could have split it up, and given everyone around $1700. Instead I decided to look into a team vacation – something that we’d all remember, something that we could all enjoy, bond over, and use to re-energize in the midst of a long winter. I asked everyone if this was something they were interested in. Yes.

I researched and found a great place in Mexico, which had good internet connectivity, and facilities. We booked the flights, and headed down in late February to enjoy the first of what has become an annual winter retreat.

The Lesson: Invest in a shared experience.

March 2009. Product development time.

Again, the team was down in Mexico on another winter retreat. Things had gone well over the past year, with plenty of interesting work, and plenty of opportunities, but we were left feeling a bit wanting – constantly building successes for others. A well oiled machine of experienced developers and designers, TWG needed a way to keep challenged, and on the leading edge. After creating successes for our clients for about 7 years, we wanted to take ownership on something, and create something for ourselves.

On that trip, we spent a good deal of time mapping out who we were, who we admired, and how we could improve to achieve our objective in emulating some of their success. One of the ways we thought this could happen was by conceiving and building our own online products. TWG committed to spending time and money on the development of our own products. PostageApp was the first of what we hope will be many online applications.

The Lesson: Listen to the team, respond to their ambition. Make it happen.

March 2011. Lab time and team ownership.

Since the great recession, things have really heated up in the web development world. Salaries for web developers have gone through the roof in the valley and NYC, and yet we’ve maintained an experienced, satisfied team. We’ve diversified our work to include a good amount of product development, while maintaining a roster of great clients. This past winter retreat, after listening to the team, and what they wanted, TWG redoubled it’s efforts to encourage an entrepreneurial environment that keeps us all challenged and gives everyone some of the upside to our efforts.

We decided to formalize two key developments:

1. TWG committed to increasing our lab-day and product development time to 25% of our work schedule.
2. TWG committed to reserving 30% ownership in all team-conceived and developed projects.

The Lesson: Carve out the time, create alignment, share the sweat and the wealth.

It’s exciting times in the web and mobile world, and I truly believe that we have a better chance to succeed as dev shops and startups if we create alignment between all the stakeholders. The suits, the geeks, and the fancy pants.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

VIDEO UPDATE: What’s better than nerds, pizza, and beer? Our thoughts exactly. That’s why on May 19th, we gathered Toronto developers at the TWG studio for our debut #nerdlearn panel, THE FUTURE OF RAILS. A big thank you to our three panelists, Kevin Faustino, Pete Forde, and Scott Tadman, as well as to our wonderful(ly nerdy) audience for their amazing questions and participation.

As promised, our marketing superstar (and part-time videographer) Jon Lim filmed the event… enjoy:

Thank you to all the panelists and attendees that made it out to nerdlearn last night. We had a great time, and were very impressed with the quality of discussion, questions, and learning.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to our distinguished moderator, Dessy Daskalov, who did an amazing job of organizing the event, and setting the tone for our discussion on THE FUTURE OF RAILS. Thank you Dessy, we look forward to many more nerdlearn panels.

Some highlights from the night:

“PHP developers are typically like hunter gatherers… occasionally there are pockets of civilization (cakePHP, Fuel, CodeIgniter)”
- Scott parallels programming communities to the evolution of human subsistence strategies.

“When Unspace started off, our customers asked us what would happen if we all fell out of a plane? We encouraged competition, so our customers would be comfortable using Rails.”
- Pete pointed out that the biggest challenge facing Rails, is the lack of up and coming junior developers. Large companies rely on a reliable supply of developers to continually meet their software demands.

“The biggest problem Ruby has with moving to the enterprise, is the firewall… gems”
- Kevin on the resource restrictions RoR devs can make use of behind enterprise firewalls.

Thanks again, and hope to see you at future #nerdlearn panels!

OTHER RUBY ON RAILS EVENTS TO ATTEND:

May 20th (today): Ruby Job Fair at Unspace, featuring Rubyists, Employers, and Spiked Tea – http://rubyjobfair.ca
June 2nd: Technologic at UnSpace, featuring Giles Bowkett – http://technologicto.com
Every 3rd Monday (except for December): Rails Pub Nite, 7pm at the Rhino
Toronto Ruby Brigade (includes Ruby Hack Night and Ruby Book Club): http://www.meetup.com/torontoruby

The first thing you need to know about TWG, is that entrepreneurship is a big part of our DNA. Whether we are helping a startup develop their big idea, cranking out quick iterations for clients looking to out-maneuver the rest of their industry, or nurturing our own great ideas into software products… we love to bring new ideas to life!

Being able to quickly appraise ideas and vet business opportunities is a challenging and necessary component to our business.

Thanks to the influence of some really smart and talented local entrepreneurs (the LeanCoffeeTO crew & StartupWeekend guys) we’ve discovered the LeanStartup / RunningLean approaches to startup growth to assist with this evaluation process. We’ve now realized how valuable this process is to all our business activities.

TWG recently returned from our 4th annual week-long winter retreat (this is the Costa Rica part). We use these trips to recharge our batteries, take stock of the year that’s been, and focus on our new product development ideas. In past years our team has organically come up with ideas at these retreats resulting in software products and tools like this, this, and of course this.

For 2011 we decided to take some of our startup learnings from the past year and do two things differently:

1. Formalize our selection process; and
2. Make this shiza competitive!

The Contest Rules:

1. Everyone from our team of 10 (+1 boyfriend) can pitch an idea. You must have completed a lean canvas to make a pitch;
2. Everyone votes for their top 2 choices – first choice worth 2 points, second choice worth 1 point. Once the top 2 projects are chosen, the teams are formed;
3. Each team describes their objectives for the week, including a 5-month vision for their project/product (end of August);
4. Teams have a budget of $1500 per team for hosting, marketing, etc.;
5. Each team worked on their respective project in Costa Rica, and will continue during our Friday lab days and personal time.
6. In August, each team will present in a Dragon’s Den type format to a bunch of tech and business heavyweights. The teams will be judged based the business’ viability at that time.
7. There will be prizes:
   Winner: All profit to date; 30% ownership in the business; Internet fame.
   1st Runner up: All profit to date; 20% ownership in the business; steak knives.

Projects that were initiated:

1. Team Feedbacker – Hesham, Jack, Oleg, Jon
Feedbacker is a javascript tool that enables clients to give sprint feedback from directly inside the browser. Feedbacker then delivers this feedback into the dev team’s product/ticketing backlog for further processing and prioritizing.

2. Team ZOMG Ponies – Scott, Dessy, Stephen, Kon
ZOMG Ponies is an iPad scrapbook app for young girls to immortalize their photo memories with digital stickers, and share with their bffs.

3. Team Top Secret – TBA
(You know.. we’d have to kill you.)

We had a very productive week, and there will be more updates to come. Stay tuned.
In the mean time, have a look at the lean canvases for Feedbacker & ZOMG Ponies.

Pura Vida!

TWG is a web development shop for designers, coders, thinkers and friends. Each day we pour all of our creative energy into what we love, and that makes getting out of bed in the morning the easiest decision to make all day.

For some, working at TWG will be a career, for others, it will be a stepping stone on the way to other even greater things. And we’re fine with that, because we know that everyone’s path is a little bit different. In fact TWG’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to become the best web application shop in the world to Learn, Work and Innovate. If you’re still intrigued, please read on..

In the winter, we take a week off and head somewhere sunny to regroup, re-energize and dream up the next big idea we want to tackle.

In the summer, we take a week to head somewhere north with a nice lake, to sit around campfires, play music, and assess our progress and plan for the months ahead.

And in between, we do all sorts of good stuff in our studio, building web and mobile apps for our clients, as well as designing and developing our own products to bring online. We’re primarily a Ruby on Rails shop that has recently started to work with html5, iOS and other mobile technologies. If you’re a talented web developer, and think you have plenty to learn and plenty to share, please read on..

So what do you bench?

There are some things you should know something about. For each line that you satisfy, count 2 points:

You have very good HTML and css skills
You have a solid grasp of javascript, jQuery, ajax, json
You have experience coding in Ruby on Rails,
You know what OOP is and what to do with it
You have written tests in either UnitTest, RSpec, or some other test driven framework
You have experience using mySQL or PostgreSQL
You use code versioning systems like git, svn, cvs
You have worked in php, or asp,

Context points. For each line that you satisfy, count 1 point:
You speak another language or have a *fünny* last name,
You ride a bike a lot,
You can play a musical instrument,
You play a team sport,
You paint, draw, sculpt, build,
You have a blog,
You use twitter regularly.
You truly enjoy learning and teaching

So what do you bench?
If you score OVER 14, then send us your score breakdown and get in touch today!

How To Get In Touch:
To avoid people who don’t like to read or have fun, or robots that like to spam the world, we want you to email us at info@twg.ca and place the the immortal words of Lionel Ritchie in the subject line: Hello, is it me you’re looking for?