Sit back on your comfortable American, European, Chinese, British, or perhaps Canadian sofa, and read the story of TWG’s very own CMS – The Comfortable Mexican Sofa – which began back in March of 2009, on our annual winter work retreat down to Mexico.

The original comfortable mexican sofa

Our annual trip to Mexico has a few purposes. It gives us a light at the end of the tunnel through the long, cold and wet Canadian winter. It provides us with a new environment to live and work in, letting us stretch our creativity and energy. It replenishes our vitamin D, and it rewards everyone for doing so much to make TWG succeed throughout the year.

Our 2009 trip was an amazingly productive week (although we only realized that many months later). The idea once we arrived, was for each of us to have a concept to pitch to the team, with the goal of convincing one or two other developers or designers to join forces with you and make it happen. On that particular trip, we worked on two main ideas:
1. PostageApp.com – which has since been launched as a successful email management system for developers.
2. Our own CMS.. a simple cms, built for developers, by developers, with the twist that it can be added into any Rails application, rather than the usual set up which requires you to build your application around an existing CMS structure (like the excellent Radiant or Refinery)

This amazing CMS was in fact coded mostly by Oleg. And where did he code it you ask? Near the TV, and dining room (nachos and coke), on a giant sofa. In fact, so comfortable was this sofa, that Oleg slept on it most nights. I have included a photo of us watching episodes of Firefly on the Comfortable Mexican Sofa, and of us eating a meal on the Comfortable Mexican Dining Table, which was on the patio near the sofa.

The comfortable mexican dining table

Moral of the story?
Go somewhere different at least once a year.
Don’t try to over-structure things.
Let things happen.

We are 2+ weeks into February, and yet I feel no shame in finally knocking off one of my New Year’s resolutions: posting a TWG photo highlight-reel from 2010.

2010 was a pivotal year for TWG, including:
- the adoption of Scrum-Agile development methodology;
- a fantastic (3rd) team retreat to sunny Mexico;
- solidifying our Wine and Good People events at the studio;
- the graduation of 4 team members; and
- the launch of our first software product, PostageApp.com.

But enough words… to the memories of 2010:

Bonus Points: an animated .gif from Stephen’s first day at TWG.

This past December 10th we hosted a holiday edition of ‘Good People Drinking Wine and Talking To Each Other’. Friends, colleagues and even some family showed up to enjoy the delights of Amarone and Ripasso style wine, a great spread of food, and three spirited talks by three great people:

Scott Armstrong, Partner at Brainrider.com spoke about the sea-change that’s happening as marketing shifts from the tactile physical world to the online world, and how getting to know your customers is eerily like dating. As a parting gift, he offered to sit with anyone, over a coffee (beer), to analyze your customers and discover the questions that they need answered, so that you can get to at least second base.

Tom Schlesinger (writingfilms.com), screenwriter, film consultant, and all-round creative character, gave a stream of consciousness monologue, about how Aliens abduct him every single time he’s forced to be creative, and how fear can drive you positively if acknowledged and properly harnessed.  If you weren’t here, I’m sorry that you’ll never understand.

and

Paul Saltzman, (PromNightInMississppi.com) the award winning film and television director, traced his own growth from his days of activism in the deep south, to his current day collaboration with Morgan Freeman, in “Prom Night In Mississippi” a film about a small town where the youth stood up in 2008 to fight segregated Proms, and how a community was changed forever. Paul finished with a challenge to us – to end our silence when we witness words or behaviour that we think is wrong,  and that by speaking out, we voice the thoughts of the silent majority.

Tegan Merle and Lauren Barless, our good friends from PilotInteractive.com, were here with their fancy cameras and lighting, taking photos of everyone who dared to wear a piece from our selection of incredible Christmas sweaters, scavenged from the racks of Kensington market. A huge thank you to the multi-talented Tegan and Lauren for their work. Enjoy their photos!

http://photography.pilotinteractive.ca/twg_sweaterparty/index.html

We’ll be hosting another Salon come the end of January, so send us a note if you’d like to get a heads-up!
Email: wine@twg.ca

Happy Holidays and New Year!

We’re very excited to be sponsoring TEDxToronto again!

This year we’ll be hosting a salon in the month following TEDxTO to discuss one of the popular themes that arises out of TEDxToronto. Our aim is to further the dialogue and create a CALL TO ACTION, which is this year’s TEDxToronto theme. That’s all we can say for now… more info soon.

Produced by: TheBizMedia.com

We have people with ancestry from Italy, Ukraine, Belarus, England, China, Iceland, France, Portugal, El Salvador, and Egypt. We’ve been anticipating the tournament for a while now and have a pretty nice set up for keeping up with the matches while getting things done.

Here’s an inside look at TWG HQ on a beautiful day in downtown Toronto during World Cup 2010…

The studio… It’s a growing, pulsing organic entity that consumes coffee, sandwiches, discussions, experiences, goals, bandwidth and brainpower. Time after time, it outputs web sites and applications that deliver exactly what our clients need.

There are no suits here, but also no pocket-protectors. We love gathering around the whiteboard, and hashing out ways to tackle a problem and then breaking into teams to crank out the code that solves it. Over the years we’ve tried many different ways to plan and build websites and applications. We’ve discovered that no process will fit all situations, and so we’ve built our team and work style around having a number of approaches to call on, but most importantly on being flexible and adaptable to the situation.

Here’s a time lapse video of a typical day at the office: