Software Reality Day by Day

We launched Videolla.com

2010-10-20T15:35:00.001+04:00

You should check out Videolla.com. Its a new web service build by OBS Labs
Videolla allows you publish and sell online videos easily. Check out 70 sec tour video (powered by videolla of course :)

We just moved!

2010-03-15T18:25:00.001+03:00

OBS Team in Russia have just moved to the new bigger office!
This was our old place:

And this is our new place:

So you want to build a web startup?

2010-03-12T11:34:00.000+03:00

So you want to build a web startup?

View more presentations from OBS Labs.

Amazing sketching tool!

2010-03-10T16:53:00.002+03:00

http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/harmony/ Amazing web tool for sketching!! This tool will make you feel like real artist even if you never hold pencil before. Great illustration of javascript/html5 power. And it works on iphone! Supa-crazy!

rish.ru - Russian Internet School

2010-02-11T16:45:00.000+03:00

Rish.ru is a new Russian startup in education space. They use AdobeConnect-powered solution to give paid classes and test prep lessons. They started with test prep on Math, Biology, Phisics etc. Typical price of classes vary from 0 up to $40

Riak vs Rails

2010-02-10T17:41:00.000+03:00

Our next project will real time chat application. No rocket science but we expect that it might work under very high load so scalability is our #1 goal. As we all know DB scalability is #1 challenge in Rails stack. Everything else scales really well.

We recently found this article about Riak and will be testing it soon with our app. Here is the link to article itself
We will post our test result soon.

Why Riak should power your next Rails app

Last fall, I heard about Riak and thought it sounded awesome, and it boasts a lot of neat features that I’ll go into detail about below. I was further impressed when I met the Basho team at nosqleast in Atlanta. They really seem to know what they’re doing.
In December, John Nunemaker wrote a post entitled Why I think MongoDB is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks. I commented on twitter:

If as @jnunemaker says, #mongodb is like Rails for databases, then #riak is like Merb.

His reply was quite humorous (no, John, Riak won’t merge into MongoDB), but it got me thinking. So here are my…

7 Reasons why Riak is the Merb of databases (or better)

…and why it should be the database for your next Rails app.

Scales horizontally without pain

Riak runs just about in the same way on 1 node as it does 100. This is because, in short, it is an implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo. Need more storage capacity, throughput and availability? Add more nodes.
Now, a lot of people throw around the word “scalability” without really knowing what it means. It’s really a ratio of the desired properties of your system to the cost inherent in achieving those goals. High scalability means you have a low cost in proportion to your ability to grow. It has nothing to do with performance (although good performance can be a side-effect of good scalability). By this measure, actually, Rails scales well (shared nothing) — but that doesn’t mean it’s always performant (slow Ruby implementations, large memory consumption, etc). Despite the trolls, it’s pretty well known that Twitter’s scaling problems were not really caused by Rails.
So what makes Riak more capable of handling growth than MongoDB, CouchDB or MySQL? It’s built with master-less replication in mind from the beginning. When you grow a MongoDB or MySQL database, you typically add a slave server which receives and replays the transaction logs of the master server. Ideally, this slave can take over if the master goes down. There are also master-master setups and other ways of configuring replication, but in general it’s a thing you add on, not built-in.
Instead, Riak has no notion of a master database node. Every node participates equally in the cluster and spreads the load in a predictable way using consistent hashing (another feature of Dynamo). So yes, increasing capacity and throughput and all those other things you expect from your database is as easy as starting up new nodes and having them join the ring. Data will be replicated in the background. You can even run Riak nodes on less-powerful machines (think EC2) and get decent results. Large, monolithic DB servers are the last vestige of the mainframe era, so democratize your database layer!

HTTP-Compliant REST interface

Rails nerds like me love REST, but most don’t really understand what it means, or rather think that it is a one-to-one mapping to CRUD. Rails’ concept of REST is at best incomplete and potentially misleading. (See also Scott Raymond’s RailsConf 2007 talk)
The Riak developers spent a lot of time creating an awesome toolkit in Erlang for building RFC-compliant HTTP resources, and Riak has several of them. This means that when interacting with Riak, you use HTTP in a natural way and get predictable responses — even the hard stuff like content-negotiation, entity tags and conditional methods.
The side effect of composing Riak of well-behaved HTTP resources is that it plays very nicely with other HTTP-related infrastructure, including proxies, load balancers, caches, and clients of all stripes.

Robust failure recovery

One of Riak’s most compelling features is that it handles node failure robustly. If a node goes down in your cluster, its replicas will take over for it until it comes back, a feature known as hinted handoff. If it doesn’t come back — as happens all too often on EC2 — you can add a new node and the cluster will rebalance. The failure recovery story for MySQL, even in a replicated scenario, is much more difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
Riak has fine-grained robustness as well. It was built primarily in Erlang and with the OTP Design Principles in mind. One aspect of the OTP design is that the processes in the system are organized in a supervision tree, so that when one crashes, it will be restarted by its supervisor process (which is in turn supervised). Send some bad data to the web interface and get a 500 error? That internal error doesn’t crash the whole system, bringing your database node down.
Justin Sheehy, Basho’s CTO, tells a story of a customer whose cluster had two nodes go down late one night. The Basho team looked for less than 10 minutes at the cluster, verified that it was still going, and then decided to wait until the morning to fix the lost nodes. As Joe Armstrong, Father of Erlang, says (paraphrased), “In order to have fault tolerance, you need more than one computer.” Riak embraces that philosophy.

Links make graph-like structures possible

Most Dynamo implementations are simple key-value stores. While that’s still pretty useful — Dynomite is really awesome at storing large binary objects, for example — sometimes you need to find things without a priori knowledge of the key.
The first way that Riak deals with this is with link-walking. Every datum stored in Riak can have one-way relationships to other data via the Link HTTP header. In the canonical example, you know the key of a band that you have stored in the “artists” bucket (Riak buckets are like database tables or S3 buckets). If that artist is linked to its albums, which are in turn linked to the tracks on the albums, you can find all of the tracks produced in a single request. As I’ll describe in the next section, this is much less painful than a JOIN in SQL because each item is operated on independently, rather than a table at a time. Here’s what that query would look like:

GET /raw/artists/TheBeatles/albums,_,_/tracks,_,1

“/raw” is the top of the URL namespace, “artists” is the bucket, “TheBeatles” is the source object key. What follows are match specifications for which links to follow, in the form of bucket,tag,keep triples, where underscores match anything. The third parameter, “keep” says to return results from that step, meaning that you can retrieve results from any step you want, in any combination. I don’t know about you, but to me that feels more natural than this:

SELECT tracks.* FROM tracks
  INNER JOIN albums ON tracks.album_id =  albums.id
  INNER JOIN artists ON albums.artist_id = artists.id
  WHERE artists.name = "The Beatles"

The caveat of links is that they are inherently unidirectional, but this can be overcome with little difficulty in your application. Without referential integrity constraints in your SQL database (which ActiveRecord has made painful in the past), you have no solid guarantee that your DELETE or UPDATE won’t cause a row to become orphaned, anyway. We’re kind of spoiled because ActiveRecord handles the linkage of associations automatically.
The place where the link-walking feature really shines is in self-referential and deep transitive relationships (think has_many :through writ large). Since you don’t have to create a virtual table via a JOIN and alias different versions of the same table, you can easily do things like social network graphs (friends-of-friends-of-friends), and data structures like trees and lists.

Powerful Map-Reduce and soon, Lucene search

The second way to find data stored in Riak is using Map-Reduce. Unlike links, where you have to start with a known key, you can run map-reduce jobs over any number of keys or an entire bucket.
One thing that might not be immediately obvious when using an SQL database is that the declarative nature of the query language hides the imperative nature of performing the query. SQL databases have sophisticated query planners that decompose your query into several steps (see EXPLAIN command on MySQL) and attempt to optimize the order of those steps based on known table properties, like indices, keys, and row counts. Riak’s map-reduce, while still largely declarative, lets you decide which order to run steps in. You trade a little abstraction for a lot of power.
Riak’s map-reduce is also quite different from CouchDB’s views:

You’re not trying to build an index which you’ll query later, you’re performing the query.
You can have any number and combination of map, reduce and link phases (link is actually a special case of map).
Since it’s not an index, your query need not be contiguous across the keyspace.
There’s no concept of re-reduce because reduce phases are only run once.

Up until recently, you could only write map-reduce jobs in Erlang, but thanks to Kevin Smith’s awesome work, you can now write jobs in Javascript and submit them over the HTTP interface. This opens up a lot of doors to developers who aren’t familiar with Erlang but use Javascript every day.
Although not complete or released, Basho also has an awesome Lucene-compatible search system in the pipeline (already in use at Collecta, or so I hear). I saw it in action this past week while in Boston and was impressed. It’s fairly comparable in performance to Solr for large datasets, but scales across your Riak cluster.

Beyond schema-less: Content-type agnostic

One thing that may seem unintuitive at first is that Riak doesn’t care what type of content you put in it. CouchDB and MongoDB use JSON and BSON (Binary JSON), respectively, to store objects. Instead of forcing a format, Riak lets you store pretty much anything. There’s no concept of “attachments” or “GridFS” (unless you add it yourself), so just store the file directly in a bucket/key with a PUT or POST request. As long as you specify the “Content-Type” header, Riak will remember it and give you back the right thing when you access it the next time. No need to do base 64 encoding to store a picture, PDF, Word document, podcast, or whatever. This could enable you to replace a distributed filesystem like GFS, or even S3, with a Riak cluster. Bonus: you get replication and fail-over for no extra cost.
There are some minor kinks with large files (>100MB), but I’ve been assured by Basho that they are addressing the issue. In the meantime, you could chunk the file manually and follow links to get the pieces and put them back together.

Tunable levels of consistency, durability, and performance

The knee-jerk argument against Dynamo-like data stores is that they don’t have ACID properties and that “eventual consistency” is too eventual. In practice, especially in large deployments and high throughput scenarios, ACID breaks down because it requires actions to be “all or nothing”, effectively creating bottlenecks while clients wait for transaction handles. If you’ve done any distributed or concurrent computing, you know that contention for shared resources is a primary cause of failure, including problems like deadlock, starvation and race conditions. For the sake of reducing single points of failure (bottlenecks), Riak implements eventual consistency — where storage operations are accepted immediately, and then propagated across the cluster in an asynchronous fashion. This makes it nearly always available for writes and reads.
In order to deal with inconsistency, Riak tags each datum with a vector clock that internally reveals the datum’s lineage (who modified what version). When there are conflicts — that is, two parallel versions of the same datum — Riak returns you both versions so that your application can decide how to resolve it. In an SQL database with this kind of conflict, your transaction might fail and rollback, forcing you to resolve it and retry anyway.
Beyond just eventual consistency, Riak lets you tune the amount of consistency, durability, and availability you want, even somewhat at request-time. If you need more read availability and replication, you can increase the N value for a bucket (number of replicas, default 3). If you want to be sure the data you’re reading is consistent across the cluster, increase the R value at request time (R, read quorum, is always <= N). If you want high assurance that your data is stored, increase the W and DW values (W = write quorum, DW = durable-write quorum, both always <= N). If you want better performance, e.g. to use Riak as a persistent cache, keep the R, W, and DW values low. You also have the choice of which backend to use when storing your data on the replicas (anything from in-memory to on-disk, or combinations), including the recently released Innostore. Although in many cases the defaults are good enough, you have the flexibility to choose a model that fits your application.
(Note: currently, the N value must be set before you insert any data into the bucket).

Why Riak for Rails?

Ok, so those are the reasons why Riak is awesome in my mind. Why should you use it in your Rails app (or other Ruby application)? Here are some possibilities:

Scale up (or down) cheaply: Riak can grow horizontally with your app, either in lock-step (have database nodes on your app servers!) or independently. A colleague described it as a “Christmas tree” — you could have a load-balanced cluster of Ruby processes and behind that a load-balanced cluster of Riak nodes.
Ease of deployment: No longer do you need to break out or specialize nodes to be database-only, unless you want to. The homogeneity will make your sysadmins happy, and HTTP-friendliness means they already know how to grow the infrastructure.
Flexibility: You can use Riak as a document database, a cache store, a session store, a log server, or a distributed filesystem, with custom settings for each scenario. Soon you’ll also be able to use it as a Solr search replacement.
Powerful modeling: Use links to create relationships in a natural fashion, reducing the number of JOIN-like operations, and then discover data using arbitrary-depth link-walking, or create custom queries with map-reduce.
Background processing and analytics, a.k.a. Big Data: With high write availability and the powerful map-reduce framework, you could defer complicated calculations and later run them in parallel across the Riak cluster. Think data warehouses or Hadoop, but with 1/10 the LoC and no Java.

Where Riak has room to grow

I love Riak’s capabilities, but let’s face it — no system is perfect. Here’s where it could be improved:

Library support: Although it’s REST so you can theoretically use any HTTP client, the included client libraries are pretty basic and use the soon-to-be-deprecated “jiak” interface. I expect that this will improve real soon — we’ve already seen an open-source Java client released.
Efficient ad-hoc lookup: If you only know the bucket of an object but not its key, it’s potentially expensive to find it, since Riak has no concept of indices other than the key (for obvious reasons – it doesn’t know the structure of your content). In the meantime you have two options – eagerly create and maintain them yourself by adding objects with meaningful keys that link back to your original object; or create a map-reduce job to achieve the same result.
Reduce-phase bottleneck: Map and link phases happen with great data-locality, on the nodes where the data is stored, but reduce phases happen in a single node. This is logically simple, but introduces a potential bottleneck and point of failure. If reduce phases are also referentially transparent and idempotent, they could be federated as well, and only incur the single-node hit at the very end.
Large files: Due to some YAGNI-related issues in Webmachine and Riak’s object storage, you can’t load big files into Riak. Break your “l33t xv1dz” into chunks or store them in the filesystem for now.

What to do next

I have lots more to say about Riak (hard to believe, right?), so watch for more blog posts in the future. If you’re ready to dive in, check out the Riak dev site, sign up for the mailing list, or join in the discussion in the IRC channel on Freenode.

Rails 3.0 Beta released!

2010-02-05T11:52:00.000+03:00

Finally! Thank to David and Core Team! Read more
Check it out now!

gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n 
gem install rails --pre

Our website was updated!

2010-02-04T17:02:00.000+03:00

Check out www.obsgroup.biz. Please let us know if you find any typos :)

We are "confirmed"! :)

2009-10-19T14:08:00.001+04:00

Yahoo! OBS Labs got official "confirmed" status from Engine Yard's Rails Development directory:
http://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/obs-labs

We need your feedback!

2009-10-02T15:17:00.003+04:00

If you've get in touch with me or my company OBS Labs for Rails consulting and development please leave us feedback here:
http://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/obs-labs/recommendations/new

Thanks! We need your voice!

Entrepreneurs can change the world join the momenent.

2009-09-10T14:32:00.002+04:00

Just wanted to share an idea of our new clients. I really liked their inspirational video:

http://grasshopper.com/idea/

8 Facts about the Russian Startup Scene

2009-09-10T14:24:00.002+04:00

Together with my friend Bjoern Herrmann we compiled this short article about Russian Startup Scene

8 Facts about the Russian Startup Scene

Did you ever wonder about the startup scene in St. Petersburg and Moscow? I spent this summer in St.Petersburg and Moscow and did some deep research. Earlier I was quite unaware - therefore I was pleasantly surprised and excited to find out how vibrant and ambitious the scene really is! Watch out for the Russians ;-)!!

Here are 8 points you should know.

Read full article on Startup School Blog

Supercool startup recommends OBS Labs!

2009-01-14T15:35:00.002+03:00

We are now working in close partnership with SuperCoolSchool (http://beta.supercoolschool.com) - very promising San Francisco-based startup in online education.
They just posted recommendation for us on their blog - check this out:
http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/resommendation-for-a-supercool-ror-team-in-russia-.html

Our internal project!

2008-12-03T14:33:00.003+03:00

Finally this happened !
After we created over 20 projects for our clients in US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia...
OBS Labs works on our own startup ! Two of our top Rails developers work on building alpha version (proof of concept) project.

I cant tell really much about it as its still in stealth mode. I spend quite some time for discussing this idea with developers, managers from US and Europe. Sounds like this can be something great but i still prefer to keep fingers crossed.
Its going to be done for Europe and Asian markets and has successful prototypes on US market (yeah US already invented everything, all you can do is adopt it locally). It is all about socializing and surviving in crisis times. I really cant tell anything more at the moment but i am very excited about this idea!
The next big thing is coming!

New US phone: +1 (415) 8303 771

2008-12-03T14:22:00.005+03:00

We changed our US phone number to +1 (415) 8 303 77 1

Wheather you are looking for new affordable software development partner, consultant on Ruby on Rails or just want to discuss your idea about next web project -feel free to call us! Normally i answer myself or one of our developers can take a message.

We dont have office manager here - yeah we all have to learn IKEA lessons especially in crisis times :)

New Rails projects!

2008-12-03T14:09:00.004+03:00

Many important things happened here in OBS Labs since my last post. We visited European Rails conference in Berlin, Germany. We completed Social Network site for web startup in Switzerland (hope its going to be another exciting site about wine). We participated in softlaunch of Quevita (http://www.quevita.com/) potentially largest European social network around healthy living style.

Now i am in conversation with Supercool School (supercoolschool.com). This can be non-profit project where i and some of our developers could use our Rails coding skills to bring Change in Africa and countries with weak education system. This is going to be top cool project and i cant wait to join this Supercool team.

Launch application in 6 weeks - myth or reality?

2008-09-09T15:05:00.006+04:00

Some great Rails development companies guarantee that they can launch the first version of your desired app in just as fast as 6 weeks!

WoW! That sounds great- we can get desirable result in about 1.5 month - this is the way one can think of it...

Is it real?
Yes it is. There is no magic here and you don't have to be David Blane to do it. Here is where the trick is. Most companies (including OBS Labs) use Rails in pair with Agile development(SCRUM, eXtreme Programming or whatever). In this approach development divide into series of 2 week iterations. As a result of each iteration clients receive fully-workable and tested code, that includes few (5-10) features for that iteration. After reviewing iteration result features for the next iter. are discussed together with client.
So typically in 6 weeks you can have 3 iteration and from 15-30 featured fully workable application. Isn't it enough for average 1.0 version, prototype or whatever? Well, it definitely should be enough to make client to sign long term contract ;-)
How can OBS Labs beat it?
Well, at first we are not trying to compete with anyone. We are small, experienced at what we are doing for years, do it good and our clients love us for that dedicated approach.
We use same latest Rails technologies, contribute to new open source trendy stuff as well, use same practices for project management, trying to keep quality as our idol.
And when you can buy two similar products you should consider price as a important factor.

Personally i love American cars. I am currently driving 2005 Chevy Tahoe and i am so happy with it. In Europe its quite expensive to have American full size, but i still love it. Those who know a little about this car know that its build on same platform as other GM models like Chevy Silverado, Chevy Suburban, Caddy Escalade and Hummer H2. I dont need to carry bike or logs so i don't need Silverado, i am not Texas farmer with 5 kids so i dont need Suburban, i dont like rap so no need for Caddy, and offroad is not for me so H2 wasn't my choice. For me my Tahoe is just the smart choice between this models. I simply dont want to pay extra $$$ for chrome on wheels and handles while I enjoy full size car, i never had problems with taking additional passenger or bag with me and i am not scared with hard road conditions. The right choice for me.

OBS value for similar project would be as much as about 3 times less than other companies can offer. They will charge you about $120-$150/hour saying that they are the only and the best experts on that market. We normally charge about $50/hour, while paying our developers about the same rate as they do! (Today rates of developers in Russia rising to EU and US ranges, and its not a good way to save just on salaries) How can we handle it? The answer is simple both they and we are using offshore developers , but our developers are all in on office in Russia, we cant afford to invest as much in marketing and advertising, being Formula1 team sponsor pay top $$$ to managers and shareholders(OBS Labs is hold by developers themselves). When you work with OBS Labs the structure of your costs is simple, clear and top efficient!

Sounds good, can you show me some examples?
You are always welcome. We just recently completed and launched social networking application in one man/month, we created ecommerce and mailing application in 2 weeks! Some time ago we did simple CMS system in about 4 weeks? Want some more? I can refer to both clients who work with us for years and clients competed their first goals for less than 6 weeks. Please contact me directly by vlad _at) obsgroup.biz for more information and consultancy on your project.

Some Rails code tips

2008-09-09T14:54:00.003+04:00

Recently we did internal code review for one of our clients.
After results been send we were asked whats wrong with code we pointed out:

v = params[:vintage].to_i if v < 100
if v < (Date.today.year - 2000)
v = 2000 + v
else
v = 1900 + v
end
end

One developer failed to explain, because he wasn't the guy who did this review and he didn't know the context.
The context was the it was inside one of the actions instead being separate method in controller or even in helper.
The tendency in Rails (accordind to its creators, and common sense) says that action code should be as simple as possible - in perfect world just calls to some methods and rendering page
In this case it should be something like

v = get_vine_vintage(params[:vintage])

or something, with method defined somewhere else. We always should keep controller actions code clean and readable.

After European RailsConf

2008-09-09T14:44:00.003+04:00

Thanks to everyone who met us at RailsConf in Berlin! It was nice to meet all of you and to hear the last tendencies in Rails development from principals.

This year event wasn't as popular as year before but i believe its all for good. After being known as a silver bullet for killing web projects that everyone wanted to hire, Rails is becoming de-facto one of the smartest options for small-medium size web projects.

Some update on our projects: we are running 3 projects for our Swiss clients at the moment, still working with one of the oldest and most valuable clients in US, looking forward to pick another US client which is a well-known web 2.0 site.

Rails Conference Europe '08

2008-07-24T13:40:00.002+04:00

Don't forget to register on European Rails Conf that will be held 02-04.09 in Berlin, Germany!
OBS had a lot of fun there last year, same as on main event in Portland, OR.
Registration site:
europe.railsconf.org

See you at Railsconf!

OBS Labs Launches the First RoR Social Network Adult Site

2008-07-23T13:04:00.003+04:00

Recently we released version one of Dominatrix (www.dominr.com)– the first Adult social network website based on RoR.
It was done in just a few weeks by Dmitry Vyazov, OBS Labs Senior RoR Developer.
Site offers popular features enabling people collaborate – private messages, photo galleries, blogs. In just a few days over 30 users already registered there. We hope that target audience will find this resource very useful
“Using Ruby on Rails helped us to run site fast and keep good possibilities for extending and scaling application”, Dmitry says.

Kyte: Check this out!

2008-04-11T13:03:00.000+04:00

Mail Servers Update

2008-03-10T10:51:00.003+03:00

We are in process of migration to the newer mail server.
Some of your emails to @obsgroup.biz may not be delivered

Please use "read report" option for all your emails to us with next two days.
Thank you!

New European Projects!

2008-02-27T12:14:00.002+03:00

After my trip to Berlin, Germany I am happy to announce that we are continue and extend our relations with European SW companies

We will continue work on billing and potentially other modules for Berlin-based startup with is on Medea-exchange market. Their new product hopefully will play a revolutionary role in B2B media exchange and sales and OBS is happy to be a part of it!
We just signed long term contract with a new Zürich, Swiss-based startup company. They are in development of unique health-style community site. We hope that our team would help them a lot in this project. At initial state a team of just Alex and Slava will work with them, but potentially we are going to extend these relations.

We are very happy to grow up our business in Europe and always looking for a new partners there as well as in States and all over the World.

Amazon Web Services Services

2008-02-12T02:06:00.000+03:00

We are proud to start up a new project using Amazon Web Services(tm) technology.

Basically it's an innovation technology that allows you to scale your applications on data and computing as easy as never before.

Simple Storage Service (S3) - is a technology used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time on web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own services.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Just as S3 enables "storage in the cloud", Amazon EC2 enables "compute in the cloud". Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment.

OBS Labs is just a one of a very few groups all over the world who have so deep experience with AWS platform. If you are interested in our services as well please feel free to contact us!

Registration for RailsConf 2008 is now open!

2008-01-29T23:05:00.000+03:00

I already got mine, don't forget to register fast- it will be sold out quickly!
Register here: https://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/register

See you in Portland!

New projects updates

2008-01-08T20:51:00.001+03:00

We got a bug rush on all projects after NY holidays here.

Here is just a few of projects we work now:

We finished Iteration 2 (Project management) of ERP system for US SEO and web development company. Now expecting some feedback on it and cant wait to continue with other modules.

Yesterday we also started development of new social network that will be focused on adult content. Its for our new UK client. We are doing it in a very rapid agile way so expecting to have good results within couple weeks.

I am also in a discussion of our partnership with Germany company that provides B2B services in media content exchange. They are seeking for provider to develop their billing and accounting subsystem. This going to be challenging and interesting task for couple of our developers. Hope after that we can continue our relations and i could visit Berlin again :)

Aslo we are on deadline week for our Team Management web site where we faced unexpected troubles with payment systems and need to replace it to paypal very urgently.

Bill Gates leaves Microsoft

2008-01-08T20:48:00.000+03:00

Anyway this guy made a lot for the industry.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

2007-12-26T13:28:00.000+03:00

OBS Labs wishes Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to our clients, partners and friends!

Let New Year be successful for your life and business. And we are always near to bring your SW ideas to life!

PS: We have day offs within Dec 31st -Jan 3rd, but i am always on phone as usual.

Promote and sell with autoresponder application responderboy.com!

2007-12-14T14:07:00.000+03:00

Don't forget to check out application we now supporting www.responderboy.com
Its all-in-one solution for online marketing and sales. It would be specially interesting to German customers, as it was recently translated to German!

Web ERP solution? YES!

2007-12-14T13:40:00.001+03:00

We just finished Iteration One of our new project. This is complex web ERP system for US company that offers SEO and web development services. System was coded on RoR and hosted on customer's internal server. At this iteration we implemented CRM module and part of proposal creating flow.
This revision includes following features:

User registrations with access permissions.
CRM dababase of clients with custom fields and search abilities.
Lead flow- process of creating new lead and tracking sales process
Proposal creating flow
Uploading unlimited documents
Tracking contact history (calls, emails)
Managing tasks
Tracking projects
Customizable UI with dashboard screen.

Above features were implemented in just a 2 weeks by our Sr. RoR developers Slava Dushin and Denis Rystsov. Great work, guys!

After client's testing we are going to continue our development. A lot of modules should be developed more: Accounting, Time Tracking, Project Management, Auto deploy content to client's web sites, automated SEO and submissions processes support.

-Vlad

Three ways to organize your team: co-located, outsourced, or global

2007-12-14T13:30:00.000+03:00

I found this great post on http://blog.assembla.com/ by Andy Singleton.
I talked about global teams at latest rails conference in Berlin, also naming them the next "big thing" and trend. Andy could amazingly "repeat" my ideas. I fully agree with him!
The short idea is - outsourcing is not a way in ourdays. If someone just going to cut his budget putting some work to India, i bet 99% he will not be success. While global talents, skills and knowledge + newest communication technology born new phenomena of today: GLOBAL TEAMS
Absolute mustread!

When people see our process in action, they often call it "outsourcing", but actually, it's quite different. We work with single, unified, global teams. Nobody is "in" or "out". The shift from outsourcing to global teams is a big trend. This article will explain the difference and give readers some hints about choosing the correct organizational structure for any given project.

We can classify work at the level of a software team into three broad categories:

Co-located
This is the traditional group of people working together in an office.

Outsourced
An outsourcing arrangement involves two or more separate teams, with responsibilities divided explicitly between the teams. For example, the "in" team might be located in Boston and do specification, and the "out" team might be located in India and do implementation and testing.

Global team
A global team is distributed geographically, but it does not have a fixed division of responsibilities between locations. Work goes to the team member who is best able to do it.

What about Enterprise? If a big company can seamlessly coordinate its various offices, does that represent a different form of organization? It does not. Enterprise management actually breaks down into a combination of the three previous methods. No coordination is seamless, and the people that manage big companies understand that. So, they will break down projects into a combination of the three forms of organization described above. They will set up some local offices with co-located workers, and some global teams that are managed and funded as a single distributed team. At a larger scale, they divide working groups into cost centers with budgeting and chargeback arrangements that closely resemble outsourcing arrangements.

Co-located teams have an advantage in productivity, because communication is simple. Managers also feel they are easier to manage, because most managers have experience managing groups by personal interaction. However, they are increasingly difficult to arrange, because it's hard to get all of the necessary talent in one place. Geography makes it hard to get these teams together. In any given locality, there appears to be a talent shortage. And the natural and random movement of people makes it hard to keep them together. How hard? In the last year, I have not seen a single team bigger than eight people that was co-located.

Outsourcing has spread rapidly for reasons of cost, quality, and scalability. It achieves cost advantages by moving work to locations where people get paid less. It can achieve quality gains by moving work from organizations that don't offer a senior career path for the outsourced task (eg server admin) and don't offer wide experience, to organizations where specialists can get promoted in their specialty, and gain more experience. And, outsourcing arrangements have proven to be very scalable, with big companies able to make big purchases.

Unfortunately, the advantages of outsourcing are shrinking. The cost advantages have mostly dissipated because of wage increases and currency gains in "low cost" locations. The potential for quality gains has been limited by a focus on low cost and an depletion of the talent pool. The benefit of scalability is canceled out by the cost, in the form of risk, of problems in a big contract.

Specifically, outsourcing is a bad choice for the kind of product development work that I specialize in. There are three major problems that develop - quality, workload, and risk. First, the focus by most outsourcing firms on low cost and fixed pricing per "resource" means that they are motivated to give clients the cheapest or most available individual that meets any set of buzzword requirements. This works well in stable enterprise situations where predictability of process and year-on-year cost reduction is the explicit goal. In the business making new software products, individual talent is a huge variable that controls the productivity of the team and the quality of the output. Outsourcing arrangements are not designed to get clients the best individual talent, and in fact, can be disastrous. The second problem is that the explicit division of labor between teams leaves a lot of work for the client. To send a job "out", you have to do specification, and then acceptance testing. If the outsourcer is only doing implementation, it saves little or no work for the client. Other ways to divide the tasks produce similar workloads for the client. The third problem is risk. When a client hires an outsourcer, the client hires the management team, work process, work infrastructure, and implementation talent in one package. If any of those components don't work out, you have to unwind the whole process and start over from the beginning. That's costs a lot of time, money, and management attention, and is likely to be a fatal event for a startup. Hiring an outsourcer is a lot like hiring an individual contributor. No matter how careful your interview process is, a new hire has only about a 50% chance of working out for both sides in the long term. So, a startup accepting an outsourcing deal, without the resources to start over, runs a 50% risk of total failure. And, it takes extra time to get started because you have to carefully qualify candidates and manage this risk.

So, we have focused our energy on the third way of organizing - the single global team. It's more challenging to manage than a co-located team, so we have studied the tools and processes that make a global team easy to manage. Most software teams are distributed, so they need these tools and processes anyway. We believe that any loss of efficiency is more than made up by the savings in time from not moving people around. Global recruiting relieves the talent shortage.

We have also worked to solve the specific problems we identified in the outsourcing model. We raise quality and productivity, sometimes dramatically, by qualifying each individual with competitive trials. We qualify people who are good enough to perform the complete range of tasks required, and we distribute everything to the team, from initial design discussions to final delivery and customer support. It becomes a unified organization where everyone is "in" and ready to work on any task. Finally, we reduce risk by not sending things "out" in big chunks. Everyone is hired individually, including the team lead. All IP, including discussions, code, build processes, etc. is held on the Internet under the control of the client. So, if you need to make any changes on the team, you can bring new people in one by one without massive disruption. Risks are small and incremental.

Unified global teams are the next big trend. Work with one today.

Posted by Andy Singleton on Sun, Dec 09, 2007 @ 06:13 PM

Check this out: Syncmyteam.com

2007-11-29T15:10:00.000+03:00

You may try out this exciting site we released recently www.syncmyteam.com

In short its a Projects/Tasks management similar to Basecamp. But it still has some unique features and may be interested to German-speaking users as it has German UI as an option.

Congratulations to Patrick Holzer Swiss-based Entrepreneur and our valuable client!
Our senior RoR developer, Slava Dushin, worked on this project for about 1 month, design was done by SofaMade professional web 2.0 design studio

Our Rates

2007-11-23T15:02:00.000+03:00

Recently I had couple misunderstandings with our potential clients. It like to put things straight.
OBS Labs Ruby on Rails developer rate is US$ 25 /hour. Projects with over 160 hours/month budget are renegotiable.

This change still doest touch our current projects.

As i noted before this only because of recent €/$ changes, not because our growing greed. For clients from EU € rates are always welcome.

Release celebration!!!

2007-11-09T14:47:00.000+03:00

Recently project, our developers took part in, released ver 2.0

Alex, who is one of 4 developers in this team, bought some cookies and sweets to celebrate this exciting moment!

I took couple pictures meanwhile –sorry for quality Moto Razr isn’t best phone capturing device ;)

Congrats to our team Alex, Dmitrys Desyatkov and Vyazov and Alexey!

Dima is looking for something sweet

Alex enjoys his cookies

just nice pic :)

Cookies!!! (Not IE's ones)

Alexey also wanna try some...

... and back to work...

Choosing right projects

2007-11-06T15:01:00.000+03:00

We have completed another project recently - its a Basecamp clone project management application. Some design artwork should be done more, but in general project is completed.

In the same time I am sad to see how many of offered projects we just can't take. They are too risky as requirements are not clearly defined and budget is very restricted.

Here is my short suggestion to such clients - if you are tight on money - pay attention to details of specifications: user stories, design screens...
Otherwise you should think on hiring someone professional who can help you with it, because your expenses can be as high as x2-x5 of planned budget.
And this is all not just scary stories at night - i can give you real world examples from our experience.

Also always include support and improvements costs in your budget. Because typical business plan looks like "Ok, I invest two weeks and $,000 in development and then receive $$,000 in the next week, $$$$,000 during next year..."

Good luck,
-Vlad

Football: Russia - England 2:1

2007-10-18T13:05:00.000+04:00

That was just something fantastic!
2 our UK customers and partners: Sorry, guys! :)

Update on Projects

2007-10-17T16:14:00.000+04:00

We are finalizing Iteration 1 of Project management tool (BaseCamp clone) on this week.
Meanwhile we are still stuck on designing new screens and bugfixing for HR web project.
In the same time the same time i didn't get another project i planned to have next week- so we have one developer not loaded.

We are open for small and mid projects now (that can be done by one person). If someone have something in mind -give me a shout!

Free services from OBS Labs

2007-10-15T21:22:00.000+04:00

As I recently wrote we have opened a new department. More over i did one thing that i planned long time ago and haven't time to do.
You can check wolfservices.blogspot.com for details. What's cool here? In short words now you can for FREE:

Evaluate your team - interview, code review
Have me as your part-time daily project management assistant.
Pass interview and showcase your expertise.

And this is all absolutely free.

New department

2007-10-12T17:08:00.000+04:00

As I recently announced we are completely moved on Rails and our company supposed to be the biggest Rails Lab in St.Petersburg.
I moved all .NET and Java people to RoR department, leaving only support people to help our clients with applications we created for them(mostly .NET client/server)
Why we choose Rails?

We collected pretty good experience in it
I believe it really speed up typical project development cycle.

My nearest goal now is to open special department where i will mostly work myself and with our top experienced developers when needed.

With my over 5 years experience in sw outsourcing i am going to offer unique Audit, Consulting, Interviewing, Remote Project Management services.

I know Russian, Eastern Europe and India sw outsourcing markets very well, and i believe my services will be useful for those companies planning to archive best from their remote outsourcing partners.
We will start this service under new brand other than OBS, but its still me and our best experts. If you have questions about this right now you can contact me immediately

Vlad Gurgov,
CEO, OBS Labs

New RoR project: lightweight Basecamp clone

2007-10-12T16:58:00.000+04:00

It was long time ago when i posted here last time. We work hard to produce v2.0 of HR site on
which should be released very soon.

Meanwhile on this week we started small but very nice and attractive project. It should be as lightweight clone of well-known Basecamp RoR project management web tool. We are creating this project for our Switzerland based customer, who was introduced to me after RailsConfEurope.
This project suppose just 2 iterations and then applying design, which is provided by sofamade. I wish Slava, who work on this project, much luck with it!

Rails Conference Europe

2007-09-21T15:25:00.000+04:00

I really had a lot of fun time in Berlin on this event. That was a great chance to meet other nice people doing same stuff.

The great difference of RoR is that Ruby people are really open and nice and we spend a lot of fun time with many of them.

So, in contrast to for example J events, as one of speakers noted, most of the time people spoke about some cool stuff they do, discuss great Web 2.0 projects, not speaking about things like "dont you know that J2EEXMLCORBARPCWSSOAP stuff???"

If some one of my new friends reading this - please drop me email, was nice to meet all of you!

I will post couple of Berlin pics i made bit later here!

Outsource your life!

2007-08-23T14:31:00.000+04:00

Recently i found Timothy Ferris http://www.4hourworkweek.com/ book and blog. He is the guy who outsource almost everything in his life and work just about 4 hours /week.
For example he outsourced online dating- Indians for about 200$ scheduled about 20 dating/week in his calendar looking for women he described on dating sites.

Really fun reading!

OBS attends Rails Conference Europe

2007-08-22T16:32:00.000+04:00

I am going to visit http://www.railsconfeurope.com in Berlin. I hope it will be fun time there are few guys i know there, and perhaps will meet many others. I am arriving 09/16 and leaving 09/20 morning. Will leave in same hotel where conf takes place.

I hope you also will be there and we will have a good chance to have some great German beer :)

Few tips to visit Russia

2007-08-21T11:20:00.000+04:00

If you will decide to visit St. Petersburg, Moscow and other Russian cities as our customer decided recently please let me know upfront. This is great idea and i surely can help you.
I will help with accommodation and tickets, also will help to schedule visit plan to attend most interesting places in our city - theaters, museums, clubs and whatever you wish..

I am always happy to help with your visit, because i feel that most of US people are wrong about their thinking of Russia.

When i talked to our client first time i was very surprised by the fact that they seriously believe that we:

Have bears outside Zoo in cities(Aha, just walking along streets, that's OK!)
Drink vodka instead of water
Call everyone comrade, and wear winter coats all the time
All believe in communism

I don't know any single foreigner who visited Russian and wasn't excited about it and Russian people. You will surely want to return here back one day!

Hot weather in St.Petersburg, Russia

2007-08-14T15:50:00.000+04:00

Weather makes sufficient influence on development process. No matter how good your air-conditioner is.

Currently its +31 C. It very much for Russian wet climate. We have air-conditioning and fans turned on max, but it still rather HOT, especially on the streets.

I have no idea hot all these people in Silicon Valley able to code at summer, hope we will feel better soon.

We are now open for Ruby projects on Mac !

2007-08-13T17:15:00.000+04:00

We finally purchased our first Mac computer to support Ruby development on OS X platform.

I traveled to Finland this weekend where Mac computers costs about 100 Euro less and purchases one in MacPeople store of Helsinki. The good thing in purchasing laptop in Finland is that you get VAT tax back on Russian border(about 14%). I bought it for 1260 and get 177 euro back.

This is 2.16 GHz MacBook in standard configuration(1 GB/120 GB). Currently our developers configure this computer and it will be used on one of current projects soon.

If you are interested in my view on Mac - i love them mostly for design, but i am not felling native his GUI, as i only worked on it few times. Of course you can always install Windows on it as it has ordinal core duo 2 inside.

Macs are mostly used in design studios and publishing agencies in Russia, while most people use Win-loaded laptops in Russia.

Hope our developers will get much experience in using Mac and i will have a reason to visit Helsinki again to buy another one :)

Ruby CMS developemt project

2007-08-06T14:33:00.000+04:00

This Tuesday we joining Belgium company in development Ruby on Rails CMS system. The project is already going about 1 year and our role would be try to join the team and help in development new features.

Interesting features that end product will include are:

Multi-Language support
Nice AJAX GUI
Serious document workflow support
Support of various Media content - video, audio, pictures storing

Product name and features are under NDA
I wish Vlad (Our RoR developer) very much luck in this project!

New Social Networking startup Lyro.com

2007-08-02T14:13:00.000+04:00

I have just created account at www.lyro.com This service is quite new, and i was the first one who created Ruby group there. Hope this resource will be popular soon

Latest News August

2007-08-01T12:23:00.000+04:00

OBS Group in coordination with our valued customer started new social web site project. This is going to be RoR/innovative AJAX based Beer Lovers Club. More details will be available after public release!

Team of 4 our developers still working on Version 2 of US-based HR web-site startup. This version will contain many new features helping employeers find brilliant experts online easily!

Congratulation our RoR team newcomers Slava, Alexey and Vladimir! Hope you will enjoy working in OBS Group

OBS T-shirts!

2007-08-01T12:22:00.001+04:00

Coming Soon!

This summer surprise for our employees and customers!

OBS Group new brand coming soon!

2007-08-01T12:09:00.000+04:00

Open Business Solutions Group (OBS Group) - IT company you know well for a long time may change brand soon...

Due to our focus on latest innovative technologies: Ruby on Rails agile development, AJAX development and working on cutting edge web 2.0 sites we decided to change name to “OBS Laboratories” (“OBS Labs”).

We think that our style of work is becoming more research and innovative, which is more like working in Science Research Laboratory than just IT Company.

Meanwhile we are strongly aimed to keep our IT motivation high, keeping best development practices and work within time and budget limitations.

New exciting HR startup!

2007-05-18T17:21:00.000+04:00

If you are involved in HR especially for IT area you definitely should keep eye on new site:
http://www.talentspring.com/ that was launched yesterday in Beta.

It brings new Web 2.0 technologies to HR sites and aimed to allow HR managers find most efficient candidates really fast.

How does it work - look at its review @ Techcrunch.com :
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/18/talentspring-aims-to-disrupt-resume-marketplace/

Meet Dmitry!

2007-04-13T18:33:00.000+04:00

We too used to be a small team... Its not so easy to find a new OBS Team member - we only want to see best people amoung of us.

So its a pleasure for me to introduce Dmitry Desyakov who joined our RoR team! RoR - is the most rapidly development dept in OBS - in fact we have more work than we can do. Hope Dmitry will help us to fulfil our need in 'smart heads'!

Dmitry have worked at companies like Alcatel and going to be one of our best-values web-development experts. I wish him luck on this way!

We also encourage you, our reader to try your forces by dropping us CV to hr@obsgroup.biz Do you still think its easy to join us? You can try...

IMPORTANT: Our mail server is down now!

2007-04-04T12:24:00.000+04:00

If you feel that we are not replying to your emails please re-send them later.

We are very sorry about this - this is our Internet provider fault. Now we are working hard to restore server.

I will notify once it will be up again.

A lot of news here..

2007-04-02T11:37:00.000+04:00

It was a long time since I posted here last time, sorry to much work, I even have to work on weekends now..

First of all we are overloaded with Ruby projects at this period. I am sorry please don't offer more project to us. We are unable to take one in nearest month or two. But if you are interested in strategic scheduling please contact me! Also of course we are not refusing of our obligations on support our valued customers.
We established long-term partnership with solid US-startup and doing huge project for them. I wish luck to our guys who are working on it now.

Then we released new version of CBS project. It is in production now. It's a .NET-based client/server application which helps to schedule usage of office-building room in UK-based business center. I hope our partner in UK will find more clients for it so we will have a lot of new features in next releases. Get more on our solutions page..

Then we are testing Ruby site for gays now. Yes, i am not mistyped. We are doing QA for GAY web 2.0 site. Well, its life...

Also we are going to prepare iShopr for public release. That's going to be really exiting project - i wish luck to David Smith with it. Check out what's going on with it on ishopr.com

Company you should NOT work with

2007-03-23T15:51:00.000+03:00

We just stopped our relations with Web Data Corporation www.webdatacorporation.com and Mr. Gordon Bennett

We worked on big web ERP system for this company.
Company is not replying to our emails, and looks like it is not going to pay on bills.
This is kind of company if would advice NOT to work with. Very sad experience.

What OBS utilizes to develop SW?

2007-03-16T16:38:00.000+03:00

We are team of 15 people at this moment. We grow very slow as its rather hard to became a part of us. We have following departments:

.NET and ASP.NET
Ruby on Rails
Java
Project Management and Consulting
Quality and Data Entry
UI and Design
ERP

Today we work on over 10 projects at the same time. What helps us every day?

Technology: all latest and cutting edge solutions like AJAX, Scriptaculous, Web Services, Web 2.0
Experience: counter on our website shows that we have about 57073 hours experience working on your projects!
Talent and commitment: We believe that its not enough to be just good expert - you need to be aimed to bring best suitable solution for your customer and share his thoughts on it!
About 13 cans of Coke / day
About 12 bars of chocolates / day
About 12 lunches / day. Each lunch consists of:

Soup
Meat/Fish + spaghetti/rise/buckwheat
Tea
Bread

About 10 papers for printing /day
We produce 2 baskets of garbage / day

That's all in general. That's how we work and what resources we utilize to develop SW for you.

www.softwareceo.com

2007-03-16T14:46:00.000+03:00

I have found nice web site. In general its a link directory but it has nice forum community. I have started some interesting topics there. Will keep eye on this site.

Web site update

2007-03-16T14:43:00.000+03:00

Our web site www.obsgroup.biz was updated. Please take a look.

Server upgrade

2007-03-15T12:05:00.000+03:00

We are upgrading our web and other servers at this moment, so they maybe unstable at this period.

We are sorry for possible problems.

WebCam is LIVE!

2007-03-14T16:57:00.000+03:00

Our web cam is live again! Check this out at:

http://www.obsgroup.biz/WebCam.aspx

Introducing...the Apple iRack - fun video

2007-03-14T16:01:00.000+03:00

Very funny video:

Outsourcing prices vs Big Mac index

2007-03-14T15:04:00.000+03:00

I spend this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. It is very nice and beautiful EU city, i really enjoyed time i spend there. Its only about 400 km (250 miles) from St.Petersburg, so it was fast to get there.
When i walked in a city center and did some shopping i have found that prices are bit higher than in Russia (even in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg)

For example 1 liter of fuel costs over €1.2 while in Russia its about €0.6
Also wear are bit more expensive. But the most amazing were prices for McDonald's "food". I am not a big fan of it, but it gives a good understanding of consumer goods costs in country

Hamburger costs €1 while in Russia about €0.6
Cheeseburger costs €2 and €0.8 here
Big Mac costs €5.6, here: €1.5

This may give you good understanding why prices for SW development in Russia as still very competitive. Of course we are not India, where prices are even lower and $200/month is quite a good salary for developer. Thankfully Russia is behind "crisis years" and and our living standard is somewhere near common in EU now, but due to high price for oil on international markets our prices still less than average in EU and US

While i don't believe in "BigMac index" as an economy theory (i think its populism of more reliable economy indexes) in SW development outsourcing area it works well. Of course not because "all developer eat BigMacs only" axiom, but mostly because it gives a good view on prices of popular good. While developers all over the world more likely spend money on McDonald's food, Pizza, Coke, etc. So McDonald's restaurants should be oriented to the customers they have in every country, right?

More about BigMac index...

www.criteo.com

2007-03-14T15:00:00.000+03:00

Just got personal invitation from Peter who is a project manager on Criteo (www.criteo.com) to join our blog to their system.

Actually dont know much yet about this system but can say for sure that it is fast to install. It take me about 2 minutes only to get this widget on our blog!

I wish luck to this project and hope it will be successfull!

We need more Ruby projects!

2007-03-14T14:49:00.000+03:00

If anyone has some Ruby project in plans please let me know!

We just started working on new exiting startup called Barjax (www.barjax.com) It mash-up for people looking for bars, restaurants, clubs and other fun places around. So another one community site going to be very successful!

We just finished number of project releases: task management application, page creator and others. Suddenly few developers get a hole in a schedule. So if anyone has some interesting project lets discuss ASAP!

Web Spiders

2007-03-07T16:06:00.000+03:00

OBS have great experience in creating web spider applications. We have just completed our last spider in about 6 hours for the site http://www.domain.com.au

Here are most popular features that common spider include:

Collects any information like emails, addresses, names, phones from popular sites and directories
Uses regular expression so easily to configure
Exports information to any type of DB including MS SQL, Excel, Access, MySQL etc
Has pretty simple user interface
Filters allow to define exported data
Based on ASP.NET and can be run on any web server

Totally we have created more than 3 spiders and many modifications for them.

Latest Projects 2

2007-03-06T17:38:00.000+03:00

Here is a second time i am going to write news about our latest development projects. I just updated solutions section on our web site, but still not uploaded all screenshots. Besides we have NDA restrictions on most project so i cant share to much information about them and our customers(some of our latest customers are really BIG guys ;) )
So, sorry just a short review, see www.obsgroup.biz/solutions.aspx for details:

. NET Departmnet

We have a project that lasting over 6 month here. Its .NET based Booking system called CBS. At this week we start working on a new iteration of this system. The goal of this iteration - remove lagacy engine it was build on called ESD. When our UK-based customer come to us with this legacy system - it contained that module which slow down whole application. After that during month we developed a number of new features and modules and now its time to remove this component as customer is going to speed up whole system.
We start working on new all-in-one business management system. It's one of the most exiting systems i ever see. You can find some details here but its under NDA of course. I am going to write separate post about it meanwhile, its really fantastic.
Also as a first project we are creating spider application on asp.net for our customer. It will collect information from web site and put it to specific databases. This is just initial project - we are going to extend our relations with this customer later.

Ruby Dept.

Just in about week we have completed Online Web Page Creator project. Here is what customer, Mr David Smit said:

I am vary happy with the work you guys did. I think its high quality work and that you did a good job of finishing tasks in time and on budget. I won’t think twice about using you guys again. I have recommended you to my friends too. And I am sure I will need you again.

It was great to work with, David. It was pleasure to work with you on this exiting project! While he had limited budget we all here hope to start working on next version of this project very soon!

Task management becomes simple with Ruby! The idea of new module that we create for another customer is to create simple to use tasks/assiments/time/management system. It should be easy as most elements can be easily drag'n'droped as you used to have in MS Outlook. Now team is struggling on making code work in all major browsers -IE, Firefox, Safari

That was newest projects we are working at at this time.

Best Wishes,

Vlad

Pair programming adaptation

2007-02-28T13:04:00.000+03:00

First explained by Kent Bent in xP, Pair Programming (a technique when two developers work together on same computer) mostly become popular because of developers.
Yes, it's fun to work in pair. As for effectiveness of this method there are a lot of research of this area.
By economy effect I mean ability to produce a certain number of same quality code by less time.
There are a few factors that should be involved:

Max time developer can active work can't be 8 hours/day and 40hours/week
Number of bugs/suggestions can be instantly found during coding by second part

That's seems to be important improvements, but our target is at least x 2 effectiveness improvement as we reduce number of developers.

My experience says that we also should take in consideration project itself.

Pairs work great on projects with tough deadline limitations
Project technology and ways to implement should be clear in general - not for research projects Its
Pairs should be under constant control by project manager to avoid stuff chats, pairs should be compatible in sense of psychology.

The third limitation seems to be the most important

Our Latest Projects

2007-02-21T16:30:00.000+03:00

At the last time we have started working on a number of new projects. Unfortunately due to NDA restrictions I couldn't name our customers, exact names of projects and technical innovations.
But I'll still name their ideas to keep our readers updated with our news.

At the Ruby dept. we are working on very cool Web 2.0 styled online marketplace allowing sellers and buyers makes deals online. This will be exiting community - customer already working on it for month and have pretty much new ideas he is going to implement.

Just at this week we also started another Ruby project - which has a goal to improve existing Time Management application by adding new features. As our company has solid experience in such kind of Ruby applications development we were chosen as service providers for this project. I wish luck to Alexey Kalukin who works as Senior Developer at this task.

We also discussing a number of new fantastic Web 2.0 applications we are going to start very soon. These include online Image editing and Page creating applications allowing users to do online things they used to do at desktop! Currently we are in discussion requirements and term of these projects.

At this week Maria finished quality testing at another Ruby application that we are doing for LLP company. This is just because customer decided to limit test team size to 1 person for this project as its getting more stable. Thanks for excellent work, Maria!

Also we are still finalizing requirements for brand new Pocket PC meter reading application, that we should stat working at very soon. It will be done on .NET Compact Framework for Win Mobile using such Features as Bluetooth, Infrared port and others

MyBlogLog

2007-02-16T12:42:00.000+03:00

Its strange but posting by email is seems to be not working anymore here :(
Here is what i posted yesterday:

If you haven’t noticed panel in the left part of blog, I’d like to introduce wonderful service: http://www.mybloglog.com/
The most important feature of it – is that it allows blog readers and writers to be nearer and discuss latest posts and news in different communities.
The most exiting news about this – the email I just got from Eric Marcoullier (http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/Eric/ ). He presented me 1 year of free subscription on this exiting service!

Thanks a lot, Eric!

Test post by email

2007-02-15T03:18:00.000+03:00

Hello this is a test post from my personal email address

With HTML TAGS test!

Warm Regards,

Vladimir Gurgov,

OBS Group,

www.obsgroup.biz

E-mail vgurgov@obsgroup.biz

Phone +7 901 304 22 63

Yahoo obs_russia

Skype obs_russia

AOL obsrussia

MSN asptech@anpps.com

Can stupid idiot buy Super Car for $100?

2007-02-14T19:02:00.001+03:00

Question: Can any stupid idiot like me buy Super Car having only $100 cash?

read more | digg story

Very good Ruby development services

2007-02-14T14:17:00.000+03:00

I'd like to say a few words about a company I proud to work with Lunar Logic Inc (www.lunarlogic.com). It has main office in Krakow, Poland. By the way very nice town when i was there couple years ago! Their CEO, Mr. Paul Klipp is seems to be well-know expert in the word of Ruby and Agile development.

Our testers Alex Petrov and Maria Levkina are happy to do QA services for this company on their new fantastic product - ERP/CRM/Accounting system.

Believe me it looks FANTASTIC! Thousands of man-hours by professional Ruby/Ajax developers look very impressive.

So if anyone is in need for professional Ruby services be welcome on their site. We are doing Ruby projects as well but seems these guys also doing really fantastic job.

Very recommended!

Promoting Software Development Company - how to become "38 signals"?

2007-02-14T09:58:00.000+03:00

Hello, I finally decided to write the most important post of this blog. The situation i want to cover is the marketing strategy basics for small software development business. OBS Group plays on this market for over 4, and i am selling our services all that time. I don't think i become expert in this area, but still think that i "ate few dogs" in this.

So the terms are usually rather hard - you have only say $500/month marketing budget. I think that's realistic sum for most Eastern Europe, India startups.

Trying to be simple i'd like just list good and bad strategies:
GOOD:

Promote yourself on SW markets and freelancers sites. Do not order ad there, but surely get full subscription and access to major products. Spend time on reviewing jobs daily and communication with promising customers. Your first goal on such sites is to get phone of client or at least email. If you see name of company on such site don't be confused to google it and contact directly, not via board on site, asking if they are in need for your services. Get some CRM application and track all you A,B,C-type clients and leads. KEEP COMMUNICATING! I know that you used to code programmes, not sell insurances, but you HAVE TO DO SALES
Do GOOD JOB This should be #1. Remember that most of jobs you will get from you existing customers having long term relations with them. Must read: Never Wrestle with a Pig by McCormack. That's 100% about SW development business!
Invest in your corporate site. You site site should be nice, contain major info about your company and services. But remember - the main goal of it is to get you new leads- so it just should make it easy for customers to contact you! Unfortunately OBS started invested in our site not so far ago, but i still believe that its important point. Do SEO for your site.
Create you own cutting edge product - simple pacman game on flash, simple service for world global pizza ordering - anything! Its much more easy to promote something having value for audience. Don't forget to put ling to your site and say who is the author of course. That is what OBS working on now.
Create your own blog about area of your expertise, try to create your own community. Not so easy, i know, but community of your area experts gives you unlimited source of new projects for your company. That is what we are doing here :) Google to find advices how to create better blogs and look at SEO post To be the honest we are still proving effectiveness of this strategy, but my feeling that it should work
Google Ad with words something like elance, guru, developers... Ruby, ASP.NET. Using names of popular web sites as keywords is a very good tip, they work best!
Patience

NO GOOD

Never buy any ready leads "just for $10 each". Just to be short - its shit and cheating. Proven.
Do not invest in banner advertisement on job and other sites. Completely useless.
Do not even try to listen "consulters", "marketing contsultes" and all that stuff. No matter what they are talking - you will always get same result - they will give you A4 "marketing letter", and and useless email list and charge you for $1000
Try to find direct customers in US and EU, and not to deal with middlemans from India.

That's all for the good start, feel free to comment if i missed something.

Technical writers needed

2007-02-13T15:40:00.000+03:00

In the latest time we have found the profession of Technical Writer is becoming more and more valuable.
On specific sites US and UE companies are looking for experienced freelancers and software companies offering their services in writing technical documentation.
Its a good way to start his own business for someone who has needed skills. Avr salary is $17-23/hour for freelance providers and bit more for specific companies offering such services
Here are some advices how to start.

What do you need to know?

You writing English skill (not like mine) should be perfect. This doesn't mean that you have to be from US or UK, but you still have to be excellent in English. That's is good chance for people from India, where cost of living is not so high and English is a native language.
You should be familiar with quoting and styles needed for writing technical documentation
You should be familiar with SW development area and have at least basic understanding of SW processes, SW development and principles of software documentation
You should be familiar with writing and formatting tools. You need to be able to write in Word convert it to PDF or HTML, be able to insert video/audio tutorials on customer's request.
You should be familiar with pictures editing basics as you may need to create screenshots and edit them
If you are working on HTML documentation customer maybe interested in making it SEO optimized so you should know SEO basics too.

How to start

Create you portfolio. This will be the first thing that customer ask you on your interview. Spend some time on creating few articles about technology you know best, document some functions. Don't be afraid to spend to much time for that - include pictures, notes and all needed to make your documentation reealy nice! If you have nice blog about techniques and SW - don't be confused to include it as well. But don't include blogs about your favourite dogs and cats

TIP: Don't try to steal something from Internet in most cases its evidently catching by companies. You just loose you chance to get work. 2-3 YOUR good examples is quite enough to get a good job.

Post your CV on job sites. Use sites like guru.com, elance.com. Do search via Google for others.

When you discuss your salary you should be clear with how much you you will get in hour.

Say customer says: You will get $50 for every page! Wow! How much! Then you realize that you every page contains 2000 letters, few screenshots edited in photoshop and even video tutorial. So it would take 5 hours of you time and you salary would be just $10/hour which is really low.

So every time be clear on how much time takes every average task, this will help you not to be cheated.

These advices could help you to earn something about $3,000 - $3,500 per month

Feel free to comment and ask details if you are interested.

Viva la simple tools - Stat counter

2007-02-13T13:25:00.000+03:00

When i am in need for hummer or screwdriver- i take hummer or screwdriver, not universal Swiss-made knife which contains both.
What i am talking about is a web statistics counter application. We use statcounter.com for most of our sites including this and recommend it to our clients when they need simple solution.
Why? Because:

Really very easy to install/use/configure tool
It contains most of stats that i need and not so much useless stuff
Completely free!
I just feel that is good tool done but good developers and want to support their product

So if you need to add statistics to you new web site as easy as 1-2-3 use statcounter.com

SEO for web shops

2007-02-13T09:52:00.000+03:00

Few days ago i have found great article on SEO for blogs Here is link to the full article by Darren Rowse: Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - SEO
I think the same idea could be easily applied to any Internet site interested in growing Internet traffic
Here are few tips from this article:

Offsite techniques - inbound links
from higher ranked sites than your own
relevant to the topic you are writing about
using relevant keywords to your page

To generate inboud links you should:

Post quality content
Notify relevant sites about your content
Use site directories
Inter-link your site
Buy links
Swap links

Author also decribes on-site techniques such as:

Keyword Rich Content
Themed sites
Site Design
Interlink your Site
Update regularity
Choose your domain name wisely
Register your Domain for a Lengthy Period
One topic per post
Write optimal length posts
Avoid Duplicate content
Ping - services like Pingomatic
Submit your RSS to MyYahoo
Quantities of Content
Submit to Search Engines

This shortlist may works just as a to-do list if you are going to increase your site popularity. I strongly recommend you to read full version by Darren as it contains links to most needed resources.

I think these ideas are universal for any kind of sites. We recommended same for online shop owners willing to optimize traffic to their shopping portals. In this case just replace blog posts to goods description

+ We have following advices for shop owners based on our experience:

Descriptive URLs: Most simple cart engines generate links for goods like www.mydomain.com/product.php?id=123&category=456. While its evidently better to have something like: www.mydomain .com/get_great_ipod_mp3_player.html. This shows SE as that we have separate page for each product.
Connect your site to as much trading platforms as possible. Such as eBuy, Amazon etc. Does anyone have statistics what percent of all online sales are done in Enterprise shops and in rest small businesses? Anyway pushing your products to bigger market is always good

Woot.COM

2007-02-12T18:31:00.000+03:00

Are we back to .COM era again?
Sometimes I think that every second man in US is dreaming to become Internent Millioner! And the most interesting that some of them really does!
Currently we are creating specifications for site simular to woot.com
Very nice site by the way, and i hope that my investment plan will be impressive so customer will decide to create his own.

If anyone has simular ideas, inspired with great plans - dont confuse to share your ideas with experts like our company's consulters. We guaratee non-disclosure, could advice strong/weak sides and assist with development of course.

1automationwiz.com

2007-02-12T17:39:00.000+03:00

One of our customers was in need for web sales site for his exiting product that he invented.
That is some kind of watches with special and unique function (prefer not to disclose for while).
We advised him to use our special offer for dotnetcart solution http://www.obsgroup.biz/specialoffer.aspx with few improvements for custom features that he requested.
But after his review of the solution he decided to stop at purely HTML pages as he found that it would be easier for him to edit HTML. Not bad idea, especially thinking that he has only 2-3 goods in catalog - no sense to use full functional cart.
One of the most important features of system was affiliate system. After long review on systems available on market he decided to proceed with 1automationwiz.com product.
I'd suggest all our readers to use this product. It has monthly few, but after long review we found that it has all features required to start online sales with affiliate program and even more: newsletter, groups, single page checkout using most of payment gateways...

Also our company desided to join our customer's affiliate program and possible to became regional dealer.

New office

2007-02-12T17:29:00.000+03:00

It was a long time ago when i posted last message. We have a pretty lot of news since that period.
First and most important - we finally moved to the new office building. That's good, but during Jan we had unexpected troubles with our ISP, who haven't kept their promises to connect us to Internet line in time.
We had a long break in work, and i am very happy to have customers who understood this and stay with us.
We are back now and hope this new office will be nice place for us.
Unfortunatelly we still not connected our office camera here, but i hope it will be configured soon.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-25T13:31:00.000+03:00

To all our customers and partners!

On behalf of OBS company I wish you Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas! Just be healthy and we will do rest for you in the new Year! :)

Sad experience

2006-12-21T15:23:00.000+03:00

We all made mistakes...
My main mistake was in making decision to work with our last client. I already wrote what hell it was - sending faxes, references, and finally just a few hour of work for that.
But the real nightmare started when one of our developers started working with him! Oh, God! That was really terrible test for our team. He asked us to stop time tracker every moment for every conversation, for every minute he validates code, blaming our developers in unprofessional and in many mistakes we did. He doesn't want to pay for fixes, blames us that we using wrong versions and so on..
Btw regarding versions - this guys doesn't know what version control system is so he thought that we should zip - copy - unzip every time we need to change something on his site. Ohhh!
Finally he said us that we are "even worse than Indians" :)
When I said that we are not willing to continue working with him:

i wish you to find another developer who will be doing all jobs much faster, be cheaper and do not any errors ( or fix them for free)

He said:

i would like to see first whether the small modification alex says he finished today that he has spent a total of 2-3 hours on works - if it does then it could restore my faith...

This is a well know policy when someone sees that you are polite with him and aimed to give him good service. What is he doing? Feeds you with shit first, expecting that he will have better conditions, lower prices and so on. My advice here for outsourcing companies - run away from such customers - you will never build good relations with them and make them happy. Even if you are Bill Gates or best coder on the Earth - he will not be happy with you! First you will do small fix for free, than he will ask you to make bigger, than he will say that your rate is too high.. And all this time he will be blaming your work expecting that you will eat all this shit.

Well, what can i say? I am angry for myself for that. I did damn error starting to work with this man. That was good lesson.

Software development process consulting

2006-12-15T18:35:00.000+03:00

In recent time we are getting many orders for Project Management and Consulting in SW industry. Typical PM project looks like:
- Hey, I have 8 developers in Minsk, Belarus for $8/hour each, 10 developers in India for $200/month each, configuration manager in Singapore for $3/hour
- How do you manage all this "team"??
- Hey, I use great tool Basecamp! I helps me to keep them all together. Ething is going smoothly and fine, just liiittle problems with deadlines...

What i want to say in such cases(but don't because of my good manners :-) ) is why are you trying to find consulter or project manager for this ... is ething is SO FINE ? Your addressing to our company means that NOT ething is fine already, but in fact often NOTHING is fine!

Typical pains of such projects are:
Extremely bad communication between "team" members
Lack of common standards
Bad product quality
Low level of developer's skills

What we do:
1) Examine current project situation
This include long interviews with all project members, clarification of their responsibilites, skills and tasks
2) Express analysis and Emergency Evacuation plan development
We provide report showing strength and weakness of current project situation. We suggest what tools he should use, what additional resources he could involve to keep his project on track. Unfortunately often we recommend serious HR resources changing - discharging useless people with low skills, hiring more experienced developers and so on. We don't do this but just notify customer that its quite possible to keep him ready
We also develop COMPLETELY NEW Project Plan according to our estimations and undertaking all risks we could see.
3) Rolling our EE Plan
The longest and hardest stage. We move forwards according to project plan we developed. Here new rules come: we talk to developers every day, make them send daily reports and review them. Talk to customers, formalizing "wishes" to user stories, keep eye on PP, fire developer, hire developers, setup QA process, have endless meetings with developers and consulting them about latest techs that can speed up them and so on..
4) Happy end
We proudly deliver Product to customer, suggest bonuses amounts to developers, discuss lessons learned, receive own bonuses for good job, discuss later versions and releases.

That's how it works for us! Do you want to try it on your own skin? Contact us!

Meebo Us!

2006-12-10T16:40:00.000+03:00

Hey, check this cool instant messaging system we inserted to our site www.obsgroup.biz and this blog! How do you like it? Now we are able instantly contact all visitors on our site!

How our customers will appreciate this!

Solution homepage: www.meebome.com

Funny timekiller

2006-12-09T16:00:00.000+03:00

Here is funny time killer that paralyzed work in our office for a few hours!
http://www.artclimat.ru/files/textedit/test.htm
The idea is pretty simple: drag red square and try to avoid blue boxes!
Our office record is holding for 21 secs! You can shoot your screenshots with records here!

P.S.: Text says that US Nave Pilots can keep for more than 2 minutes, can you believe this??

ECommerce Framework

2006-12-07T16:52:00.000+03:00

A few time ago we have started new campaign:
http://www.obsgroup.biz/specialoffer.aspx
It was very successful and we get a number of orders from small companies and individuals who is planning to sell business online. I am going to write a few success stories and about this people.
Unlike marketing white papers on our site i am going (from kindly allowing of our respectably customers) to tell more about people who has enough courage to start solid online project.

You can prove your friend in trouble

2006-12-06T19:53:00.000+03:00

Here is what one of our most valuable clients Lionel Roodyn from UK told about our company:

We found that the project ran very smoothly, efficiently and professionally. We would be very happy to recommend OBS Group. My view is that the greatest measure of the quality of an organization is how they operate in moments of stress. I can say that where there were problems we were able to call on management resources that helped us iron out any issues easily and quickly with the minimum of fuss and bad feeling despite our geographical distance.

We respect all client - no matter how big their project is and how many our developers work on it. And of course Lionel is not biggest our client at our. But, please don't get me wrong, I love to work with him most of all. He has so good feeling of business and always ready to meet and share challenges, as well as we are trying to help him when he is in trouble with his customers/deadlines. That's probably part of my work that I value most. OBS really helps companies and individuals worldwide, and its very kind to feel that our customers respect our work, sleepless nights before releases and so on. You can feel that when we are in trouble (like when some of developers are ill).

That's outsourcing business as I see it. Not "I pay - you do". But "I need a partner for something". We in OBS believe in partnership relations with trusted and reliable companies. Most of us can fall in trouble someday. But truly partnership relations only becoming stronger. As we say in Russia "You can prove your friend in trouble"

Choosing an Offshore Vendor

2006-12-05T15:32:00.000+03:00

Currently OBS works as testing services provider with great company Lunar Logic Polska. I'd like to post an article of LLP Director, Paul Klipp - who is known as valuable expert in agile development. This article was taken from here: http://www.llp.pl/site/index.php?page=Article1

Choosing an Offshore Vendor by Paul Klipp

Choosing an offshore software vendor is a difficult task. There are countless options suited to very different types of projects, needs and relationships. The costs range from astronomically high to impossibly low. Between you and the right vendor lies a fog of doubt created by (mostly true) horror stories of projects run amok. Pressing you forward is the hope that you could be on the verge of creating one of those (very real) dream relationships with a vendor that will make you the hero of your company or clients. What I am going to elaborate on in this article is the decision-making technique that I was taught in my MBA program so many years ago at the University of Illinois. The course was titled "Decision Making Under Uncertainty" and its principles are very applicable to the task of choosing an offshore software development partner.
By creating a layer of abstraction between yourself and the options and populating that abstraction layer with objective criteria, you can then view your options through the clarifying filter of your priorities. Okay, that might sound a little complicated. Basically what I am suggesting is that when faced with a decision that involves too many criteria to easily process in your head, a methodical and, equally importantly, a defensible and documented approach is more reasonable.
Most people make decisions based upon an evaluation of the options using some set of criteria that is meaningful to them. This approach is based on the assumption that the decision criteria are well known and can be matched easily against the performance features of the options. However, when there are many decision criteria and a large range of variability between options, this approach becomes very confusing and difficult to justify.
I suggest you begin the decision process by looking carefully at your evaluation criteria. When seeking a software vendor, the criteria may be:
Price
Cultural fit
Technical competencies
Timely delivery
Reliable process
Ease of communication
Next, decide how important each of these is to you. Some people advise ranking them. I disagree. In a list of ten items, ranking implies that item 2 is ten percent less important than item 1. To allow yourself more flexibility to express your true feelings about the relative importance of each criterion, I recommend taking a number and dividing it among the criteria. It doesn't matter which number you use. I'll use 50.
Price
10
Cultural fit
5
Technical Competencies
15
Timely delivery
25
Reliable process
20
Ease of communication
20
Oops, I ended up with a total of 95 and yet I am happy with the distribution. That's not a problem. All we want is relative weighting and we get that by dividing each weight by the sum of all weights.
Price
,105
Accessibility
,053
Technical Competencies
,158
Timely delivery
,272
Reliable process
,211
Ease of communication
,211
I rounded so they don't add to exactly 1, but your spreadsheet won't round. Check your formula by making sure that the sum of the weighting numbers is one.
Are you starting so see the power of this method? You now know what you're looking for. The next step is to look at options and see how they measure up.
For each option, rate them. Think about how each vendor rates on each criterion. Again, use any scale you want, just so long as higher is better.
Price
Accessibility
Competency
DynaSoft
1
3
4
ITindia
2
2
3
software.ru
5
4
1
Next, you need to normalize your rankings. We do this the same way that we normalized the decision criteria. Assign to each vendor a value for each criterion that is equal to that criterion's ranking divided by the sum of all the rankings for that criterion across all of the options. In this case, Dynasoft's weighted ranking for Price is 1/(1+2+5). Repeat for each cell.
We get something like this:
Price
Accessibility
Competency
DynaSoft
0.125
0.333
0.500
ITindia
0.250
0.222
0.375
software.ru
0.625
0.444
0.125
Now a simple formula will rank your choices.
Rank of Option(x) = PriceNormalized(PriceWeight)+AccessibilityNormalized(AccessibilityWeight)...
If the resulting ranking goes against your instincts or intuition, then rather then beat yourself up trying to justify to yourself your first impression, you can just go back to your rankings and your weightings and re-consider them. If you really think that ITindia is the best choice, then perhaps you ranked them too low or perhaps Price is more important to you than you had originally admitted. If, after careful consideration of your ranking and the way that you weighted your criteria the outcome still doesn't match your gut feel, then consider the possibility that your gut is wrong.
This same method is also very useful for evaluating options as a group. I introduced a variation of it once to a large holding company that used it to evaluate potential acquisitions. Some criteria were clear (NPV), others were not (strategic alignment, cost of cultural integration, skill of management team). By allowing many stakeholders (the board of directors) to establish their own criteria, average them, and then discuss the criteria and ratings objectively one by one, we avoided a lot of needless discussion regarding the relative merits of companies that were not really in the running but only had a few excellent points to recommend them.
We've built a free tool that you can use to apply this process to any complex decision. Click here to download it. copyright 2005 Paul Klipp

Monday in OBS

2006-12-04T17:30:00.000+03:00

Some say that Monday is the hardest day in the week - you have to tune yourself for work after having nice weekends.
Well, maybe but i missed my work in this weekend when i wasn't in office as usual. Maybe i am truly fan of what i am doing but i really missed our guys and dreamed to return to my job in Monday. And all that despite to hockey match and the latest 007 movie i visited!

Well, must be i am happy man who loves his job!

First meeting with Ruby

2006-12-01T21:41:00.000+03:00

Few days ago i found some time in the evening to get familiar with language Ruby.

It was nice to write few demo application on this language. They looks very short-spoken, but contains, but very informative.

First setting i saw, was the following code:
googol = 10**100
as you can see, ruby supports integrated exp function. It's not very important in daily development practice but it's nice to have such functionality.

At the second feature i can highlight the type converting:
object1 =10
object.to_s # return a string that represent number, in .NET ToString() method.
object2 = "12"
object1 = object2 #not valid statement , because type of object2 is string
object1 = object2.to_i #valid, it will parse a string and return the int value.

Next feature:
member encapsulation is required in ruby, it's not possible to create a public member.
It seems like a very nice feature. Also there is a good syntax for accessors (looks similar with .NET ones). The solution for that in Java looks very ugly (setA,getA).

And the last one is iterations:

friends = {"Melissa" =>"test", "Jeff"=>"test2", "Ashley"=>"test3", "Rob"=>"test4"}
friends.each do |key,value|
print key+"\t"+value+"\n";
end

where:
friends is a Hashtable
and there is an iterator below, that print key-value to the screen.

The C# code will looks like:

Dictionary friends = Dictionary();
friends.Add("Melissa","test");
...
friends.Add("Jeff","test2");
foreach(string key in friends.Keys){
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}"),key,friends[key]);
}

as you can see the ruby one looks much better except string.Format.

So i am going to learn this progressive language and also, i am sure that would help me to build faster applications for our customers.

P.S.
We have a few Ruby Gurus in our company that develop ruby solutions for many time.
If you visit our site you see that half of our projects was done using Ruby and RoR

Apply agile method in outsourcing project.

2006-12-01T21:15:00.000+03:00

In the era of WEB 2.0 is very important to build reliable solution and build them very fast. In last time top of software experts advice to use Agile methodology (http://agilemanifesto.org). This method is based on the previous ones like Extreme Programming. We have used it since the OBS's foundation. Most of our project was written according this methodology. But now, we are going to use agile instead XP.

One month ago, i was hired as independent consultant/PM to the PHP project. I can't provide here any additional information about project details according NDA, but i can write here about applying Agile on practice. This is our first experience with Agile in live project. But i am sure that it'll be successful for all, especially for our dear customer.

Currently, this project has the following problems:
- low level of the communication: everyone like to use IM instead email, bad english level of Russians developers
- low common tech skill: only one member has enough good knowledges in the platform.
- Out of documentations.

I have about 3 weeks to implement agile method in this projects.
I'll be publishing my experience about that here for all this time. And this case study should be helpful for everyone how is going to apply Agile.

Regards,
Alexander Petrov

UK Business practices

2006-12-01T18:07:00.000+03:00

No names, just facts for discussion..

Last time we are doing a lot of business with UK based SW companies.
Few days ago one very strange prospective client came to us and asked for our services.
Oh, that was reeeally Mr Hard ! He asked for references, past projects (all asp.net sites that we showed were quite small against his HUGE project), he called to our other VIP UK client and found him not so reliable (In fact i even asked our client call to him and tell a few words about us..) I even agreed to give him very low rate for our developer $15 in his project is so long term and huge..
We also filled a form about our company, were he even asked should he pay for our getting familiar with his project and so on..
Finally he contacted me in MSN and said that he need just about 20 h/week work! And asked more discount!

My questions are: what kind of business you can made looking to pay so low and save $15/week?
Is it a common practice for UK businesses? Maybe i am wrong but my position is that i am indisputable ready to pay +$1/hour for having deal with reliable partner who has office, pay taxes, have good Internet connection and so on..

How many more times i should listen this story from customers who came to us -
Oh, I had developer in India, he was $5/hour but then disappeared. Please help us with his code!

This will never stop i think..

Interviewing best practices

2006-11-30T20:29:00.000+03:00

Just had interview with "expert" for position of marketing manager in our company.
Some questions he could NOT reply:

What is ERP?
What is CRM?
What is lead?
What is sales pipe?

So i have questions:
What salary should i pay to him? His expectation was that i will pay him $1,500 for 3 marketing letters! God damn i am shocked!

2006-11-30T17:36:00.000+03:00

Hi, My name is Alex. I am representing OBS Group Company (http://www.obsgroup.biz/), and i'll post here my comments about technologies that we are use in our practice.

Currently, we work with the most intrested technologies: ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX (include different kinds of frameworks, like "ATLAS"), Ruby on Rails.

I am going to write not only about benefits for the technical persons that develop IT project. I also like to be helpful for everyone who like to touch to the newest software solutions.

I hope my notes about that will be helpful for you.

India Rocks!

2006-11-30T14:39:00.000+03:00

I have nothing against India SW developers in general (while i can't understand how some of them can code for $3/hour having 3 month programming courses in background, but still).
My English is far from perfect also.

What I am posting is just one of spam letters i receive regularly from India SW development companies. No changes in spelling, no comments:

From: mahendra singh [mailto:kmsindia@consultant.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 2:26 AM
To: sales@obsgroup.biz
Subject: Respect

This is mahendra pratap singh frm kms group india, i read your offer in getfreelancer .com, so we are intrested with you , please suggest me ,can we do work for india? how we can take start and when?payment method?

and we have not able to work so please say me .

Thanks

Regards

mps

Good news!

2006-11-30T14:21:00.000+03:00

OBS Group team has own Blog finally!

It continues our idea of making our SW company as open as possible. We started with setting up 24/7 web cam in our office, now opening blog, planning to setup audio translation on our site. Every day we are thinking and discuss new fantastic ideas that may move us closer to our prospective customers and existing clients.
Why we are doing all this? Because I think communication difficulties and trust is one of the main barriers that stands in outsourcing business. It takes a time for our client just to understand that we are good guys, and we know how to do complex software in a right way!

My dream is to make our company with glass walls so anyone could see how we doing and how hard we are working on projects.

Wish us luck in this!