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.

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!

“Good Developers Drinking Beer and Learning from Each Other”, aka #nerdlearn, is back, and this time we’re going mobile!

On August 25th at 6:30pm, TWG is hosting #nerdlearn 2.0, a 3-person panel discussing “The Future of Mobile Dev“.

Signup on GuestlistApp.

We all know that mobile is the future, but what is the future of mobile? That’s exactly the question our panelists will answer (or argue over), while you sit back, drink your beer, and ask them as many questions as you please…

Who will be there?

#nerdlearn panel = Our moderator Dessy will be joined by 3 senior mobile developers from our own Toronto community.

We’re happy to announce our 3 panelists:

#1, Jeremy Bower, Founder & President Bower Labs:

An experienced software developer with over 10 years in the business, Jeremy has worked at three Toronto-based startups that were acquired; one of them by Research In Motion. He jumped into mobile in 2008, and has since launched apps on five mobile platforms for large media brands and sports teams. His new venture, Bower Labs, is a boutique software development company specializing in apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

#2, Pearl Chen, Research & Technology Manager CFC Media Lab:

I love Android, especially that little green guy! I sometimes do Android dev but I tend to have 10 different things going on at once so I don’t have the time to dedicate to one single technology. I’m a big proponent for mobile web (over mobile apps, except where the need is actually there) and the future of webkit + html5. I’ve been working with frontend web technologies for over 10 years.

#3, Jeff Zakrzewski, Chief Architect & Co-Founder Five Mobile (now Zynga Toronto):

With over 10 years experience in the mobile industry, Jeff Zakrzewski has an immense passion for all things wireless.  Jeff’s experience in the mobile world has been sharped by working for companies including Redknee, 724 Solutions, and Tira Wireless.  Three years ago, Jeff co-founded Five Mobile, a company focused on providing strategic consulting for the mobile space, mobile applications and mobile web development for a variety of smartphone platforms.  Jeff has helped grow the company from 5 to 55 people, servicing customers such as Disney, Sony, MapQuest, Score Media, and Canoe Inc.  Jeff is now Chief Architect, Zynga Toronto after the Five Mobile team was acquired by Zynga in July.

You = A local developer who likes beer, pizza, and nerdy conversation

You + #nerdlearn panel = Funny YouTube Video

After lots of discussion and plenty of audience participation at #nerdlearn 1.0, The Future of Rails, a panel focusing on mobile dev seemed like the next logical step.

Summary:

• Thursday August 25th 2011, 6:30pm @ TWG HQ: 639 Queen St. West #501 (panel begins at 7pm)
• TWG will provide the beer and pizza (just like at #nerdlearn 1.0)
• Our panelists will provide the insights & controversy
• Be ready for interesting conversation, plenty of Q&A opportunities, and lots of beer.

Hope to see you on the 25th! You can follow updates on twitter at: #nerdlearn

Signup on GuestlistApp.

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

On May 19th TWG is hosting, “Good Developers Drinking Beer and Learning from Each Other” code named #nerdlearn. Much akin to our Good People Drinking Wine events, #nerdlearn is for local developers looking to connect with some of TO’s best senior developers in a panel/Q&A format.

This inaugural #nerdlearn will focus on THE FUTURE OF RAILS (yes, in all caps), but going forward we’ll choose topics that influence the entire sphere of being an excellent developer.

RSVP here: http://guestli.st/55083

MEET THE PANELISTS:

Pete Forde, Unspace:

In 2004 Pete founded Unspace Interactive. Not long after, he transition from proprietary Microsoft development to becoming one of the first adopters of Ruby on Rails. He was the curator of the RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences, and hosts the popular monthly “Rails Pub Nite” developer event — of which there has been over 50 to date.

An avid traveler and occasional touring rock drummer, Pete is passionate about music and film photography. He recently co-founded BuzzData, a data publishing and collaboration hub.

Pete also likes to explore places you’re not supposed to go:

—–

TWG’s own, Scott Tadman (brought to you by the number 4):

Since 1990, before most of us had even heard of the web, Scott’s been a database manager, network engineer, system administrator, software developer, creative director, writer, and electrician. So you can bet he’s involved at every stage of the projects TWG produces.

Scott is TWG’s Senior Architect; co-founder of PostageApp.com; and 4-time Science Fair Winner when he was a kid (unfortunately no photo available).

He is also the #4 Answerer on Stack Overflow for ruby-on-rails so be sure to ask him lots of questions at #nerdlearn – http://stackoverflow.com/tags/ruby-on-rails/topusers

You can also find Scott at: twitter.com/tadmanter & github.com/tadman

—–

Kevin Faustino, Nulayer:

Kevin is a passionate programmer and craftsmanship advocate who works at Nulayer as a Senior Software Developer. He has been professionally developing for 6 years, with the last 3 years focused on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

When not working, he is organizing the Toronto Ruby Brigade and blogging at adventuresincoding.com.

You can also find Kevin at: twitter.com/kfaustino & github.com/kfaustino

We also suspect that Kevin likes Lost:

Meet Kevin, Scott and Pete on May 19th, 6:30pm at TWG HQ: http://guestli.st/55083

Other upcoming Dev events you might be interested in:

May 20th: 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

1. Microsoft can’t possibly screw it up more than Ebay did. Seriously, Ebay did nothing with Skype in 4years… except sell it for almost exactly what they bought it for in 2005.

2. If they royally mess it up, then someone other than my mother might actually FaceTime me. (Apple get on this would ya)

3. Skype’s brand is so big (and respected) that they have the clout to influence Microsoft’s culture and approach to the net. Redmond’s foray into the web has been lacklustre at best. I give them minor credit for buying Hotmail back in the day, but they blew it not too long after. I suppose Bing is ok, but it’s hardly more than a plug-in for Internet Explorer* – a product which most people have to use, or don’t know how to get out of using. Skype however has the chance to shape how MS approaches their future web and mobile products, and that’s actually interesting to me.

Maybe we’ll have a 4 horse race after all: Google, Facebook, Apple, and bringing up the rear… Microsoft.

Bonus points…

The #4 reason why I’m totally fine with Microsoft buying Skype: After all these years, it appears that I’ll actually pay for a MS product!

—-

* the worst product in the history of the internet

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?

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.

Just watched a great 10 minute video (scroll down to view), made by a Brazillian research company called Box1824. It talks about youth culture, its origin, evolution, where it is today and where it’s headed in the future. Here’s what it made me think about:

1. People’s outward identities are more complex than they ever were before. I believe that one of the internet’s cultural impacts is that individuality is king. It’s now acceptable for people to have many odd, juxtaposed and sometimes incongruous interests, and to wear these identity markers proudly online. Individuality is king now. So if the 80′s were about identifying with one clique (i.e. Breakfast Club), then 2010 is more about creating your own unique delicious blend of influences.

2. Everything today is being captured, retold, and everything can be remixed. The DIY movement has never been more enabled. Creative expression has more outlets to be distributed through, and more eyeballs to show, than it ever did before. What’s the consequence of this?

Taken together, where does this lead? I see this leading to the start of a new Arts and Crafts movement. Technology will remain embedded in our lives, but I see a continued rejection of pure corporatism, and elitism, a rejection of mechanization, standardization, and a return to naturalism, individuality and craftsmanship. Witness that the food movement, the local movement, the environmental movement, have all downsized their field of view to the immediate, and to the role of the individual. Now let’s begin the countdown for technology’s place in culture to follow suit.

Now the video..

We All Want to Be Young from box1824 on Vimeo.