Recent Posts

  • Why You Need To Set Job Goals For Your Team
  • How-To: Continuous Integration with TeamCity and Behat
  • 13 Great Ideas For Small Team Events
  • 6 Reasons To Love HipChat
  • Our Team Manifesto
Why you need to set job goals for your team
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Posted on March 6, 2014

Why You Need To Set Job Goals For Your Team

This is another installment of the series “Grow It Strong: Business Ideas For A Dream Company. Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients”. In case you’ve missed the previous posts, feel free to explore them here.

If you have decided to join the up-and-coming startup and business founding trend or are already in, then you probably understand that a huge part of your success depends on the right people to work with. A perfect team is like a perfect pair of shoes – it’s comfy and becomes you and you know you can walk longest distances without getting tired. And it’s sometimes hard to find.

Feeling super lucky to having hired those ideal employees who:

  • fulfill assigned tasks with no fail;
  • don’t miss deadlines for assigned work;
  • don’t expect your supervision or vice versa, act on your instructions;
  • accept your decision or point of view or are always ready to confront;
  • are organizing gurus or a creative hot mess type;
  • don’t claim a higher payment or are ambitious as hell;
  • simply look good or are nice to talk to;
  • or posses any quality you believe is important;

you don’t want to miss one nitty-gritty point.

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Why CI?
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Posted on February 20, 2014

How-To: Continuous Integration with TeamCity and Behat

A complete guide to CI: from defining goals and problems to configuring and assessing final results

Post 1 – Why CI?

Before we get down to business, I just want to say that we’ve been planning to write about continuous integration for quite some time. And once we began, we realized that it’d be hardly possible to squeeze this huge chunk of information into a single article. So we figured out it would be a blog post series in three installments covering each and every aspect of the topic including the problem to solve and prerequisites for the practice, competitor analysis and selecting the best fitting system, installation, configuration peculiarities as well as troubles that may occur.

This very post is dedicated to explaining what CI is, what it is needed for and the best (in our opinion) software options.

Overview

It only seems logical to start with describing what on earth CI is. Plainly speaking,

a CI system is software designed for monitoring your source control service (in our case, GitHub) and automatically triggering builds on any updates, running tests or deploying a project to the server. In case of failure, your CI system will send notifications to a person who has committed the latest change as well as to anyone interested.

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13 Great Team Event Ideas
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Posted on February 13, 2014

13 Great Ideas For Small Team Events

This is another article from the series “Grow It Strong: Business Ideas For A Dream Company. Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients”. You can check the previous posts here.

Our small team feels like a big family for each of us, and like every family we have special traditions. Some of them have been followed since the company founding, ideas for others have come up randomly. But there is one thing they have in common – these “rituals” make us all stick together and stay connected.

If you’re looking for ways to get more tight-knit with your own team, you can totally try out the ideas below.

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Why we love HipChat
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Posted on February 4, 2014

6 Reasons To Love HipChat

Having been clear advocates of Skype for quite a long time, a couple of months ago we decided to switch to HipChat instead. Since that moment we’ve been considering ourselves nothing but religious HipChat users happy enough not to come back to Skype again. Well, to be completely honest, we do use Skype but it’s more the exception than the rule.

N. B. The topic is obviously not new with lots of people having strong opinions on it: they either have started benefiting from HipChat much earlier or haven’t accepted it at all. But anyway, there are those who are still deciding or haven’t even considered trying HipChat, and that’s whom we might help in the first place.

And my apologies in advance for being developer-ish and using geeky language :)

I’d like to describe issues we’ve faced before moving to HipChat and reasons for doing it as well as perks we’ve got.

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Weavora Manifesto
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Posted on January 24, 2014

Our Team Manifesto

I’m happy to introduce you the third article from the series Grow It Strong: Business Ideas For A Dream Company. Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients, where I’m going to tell you about one thing every team deserves to have.

With the business of today being a boundless sea, no company can follow its route and sail through the market storms without a shining beacon. A beacon that helps to find the right way to the company’s goals, guides through the pool of approaches and values and sheds light on the core principles.

We believe that a good manifesto makes such a guiding beacon. If written right, it acts as a reference point for assigning priorities to tasks and activities, making deliberated and reasonable decisions and behaving in the company’s best interests. By creating your manifesto, you make sure that all the team members are on the same page with you and share proper work expectations.

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Team Building Formula
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Posted on January 14, 2014

Grow It Strong: Dream Team Building

Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients

Post 2 – Our Team Building Event

I’m taking another step towards describing our company growth and evolution as well as everyday highs and lows in the series called Grow It Strong: Business Ideas For A Dream Company. Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients. This post is dedicated to the truly pivotal team building event I’ve mentioned earlier.

I’m going to guide you through the whole process from A to Z: choosing a place and topics to discuss, preparing presentations, holding the event itself, setting the right mood and creating a productive atmosphere, analyzing results and making plans for the future.

To say that we’ve been preparing hard for the event is to say nothing.

The other co-founders and I started shaping up our ideas and discussing ways to make them come alive long before the actual arrangements. But with the day X approaching, we eventually agreed on how to transform our thoughts into well-structured and engaging presentations and speeches. We were really eager to share our vision and plans and, most importantly, talk them through with the team.

A team understanding and accepting your company values and mission is the #1 trigger for constantly advancing and maturing. On the contrary, team members thoughtlessly doing the job with no grasp of the bigger goals behind will keep the company at a standstill if not drag it down.

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Dream Company
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Posted on January 8, 2014

Grow It Strong: Business Ideas for a Dream Company

Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients

Post 1 – Intro

Last month we felt like arranging a team-building event meant to bring everyone’s insights in line and get the company to the next level. It took us quite a while to get well prepared, and eventually we ended up with a really fun out-of-town get-together and a vital strategic meeting at the same time.

We spent two days talking about our company’s past, present and future; being proud of our successes and looking into our mistakes (we all make them, right?); setting “impossible” aims and discussing ways to make them possible.

That’s when we came up with the idea to transform that swirl of thoughts into a blog post series titled Grow It Strong: Business Ideas For A Dream Company.

We’ve got really excited about it, and hope that our story and business ideas can help industry new-comers not to slip up. There is lots and lots of work, risky experiments, and (who knows?) a bit of luck ahead.

Whatever time and efforts it takes, we are going to share every piece of our experience with you. Of course, our way of doing business is in no case the only right way out there, all we want is just to give our personal vision and opinion as well as hear yours.

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Doctrine2: Keep Your Repositories Healthy
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Posted on August 23, 2013

Organize Doctrine2 Repos

Doctrine has introduced an entity repository class, an object finder where you can keep methods to find and fetch entities. To make this process even easier, it provides ready made methods for creating and running DQL queries. As an alternative to writing the DQL you can use a query builder. And that is exactly what we do most of the time.

A lot of methods on our Doctrine2 repos used to perform similar functions: creating a query builder, applying criteria, setting a specific order, perhaps paginating and fetching results as well as counting items, getting statistics, creating custom hydration, etc. Basically, we stored all entity related methods regardless of the repository responsibility. We saw many people taking absolutely the same approach to their application development. Why might it have been wrong?

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Best Productivity Tools
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Posted on July 31, 2013

Productivity Tools We Love

No matter what profession you’re working in, efficiency matters. Being able to get more done in less time is the key to getting ahead. But productivity isn’t just about working harder, it’s about working smarter.

Fortunately, with a huge number of useful tools on the market today, there’s never been a better time to take advantage of the online resources to increase the amount of work you’re able to accomplish. The following ones are just a few of our favorites.

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Track Your Time
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Posted on July 19, 2013

Why Tracking Time Matters

Whether you are rich or poor, you have time – the only resource that is equally distributed among all of us. You cannot store it or save for later. You cannot put it in a bank waiting for an easy profit. Time is only valuable here & now. It’s up to you whether to waste it or use it effectively & stay productive, both at work & at home.

Have you ever come to the conclusion that the less time you have, the more you can manage to do? Sounds weird? But it proves to be true. People tend to procrastinate everything from cooking breakfast to finishing up an important presentation. However, once you have a time limit for a heavy workload, you can summon up your inner resources to have all that done in time.

Have you ever thought about why people keep grumbling about the necessity to log their working time & keep their timesheets up-to-date? The point is that people don’t see the reason why it’s actually important for them, and not for their employer. Let’s figure it out.

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