The idea of building Weavora, a small-sized company with a focus on custom web-development, was born 3 years ago. The other co-founders and I had already had a great deal of experience in the information technology industry & and were well aware of major drawbacks software companies usually had.
Somehow everyone thinks that modern product executives should live and work in Silicon Valley. That every successful start-up has an onsite team behind it from the early days. That software outsourcing or offshoring is evil and you won’t get a great product in the long run. Start-ups are too innovative. Blah-blah-blah…
For a long time I’ve been intending to express my own thoughts in this regard because honestly I’m upset to hear people saying these unreasonable things and lumping facts with unsupported stereotypes.
In this blog post I’m going to tell you a story that explains why our team has chosen Symfony2 over Yii v1 that we have used for a long time.
You might think there was a big meeting where we decided that our primary framework would be Symfony because blah blah blah. I’m afraid to disappoint you but the true story is more trivial.
A lot of entrepreneurs often ask us the same questions:
What technology stack should I build my start-up around? What do you guys propose? Which one is trendy now? What frameworks/libs/tools does my start-up need to use?
In fact, there is no right or wrong answer to these questions. It’s a decision every company makes for itself depending on what they are trying to create, and it’s usually based on the skills and background of co-founders. Moreover, when working on pretty complex projects, you’ll most probably use a whole bunch of tools optimized to effectively solve a specific problem, i.e. a choice of development stack is based on problems to solve and needs to meet.
We love prototyping, and a chance to bring our coding skills to the table and integrate them with UX design puts a big smile on our faces :) We see more and more folks coming around to our way of thinking and getting their products on board the prototyping train.
There are many responsive HTML/CSS frameworks out there, but one of our favorites is Twitter Bootstrap due to ease & speed of development and quality documentation it provides as well as its slick visual appearance.
I’d like to share a collection of interesting samples based on Twitter Bootstrap and thus inspire you. You’ll see that it only takes a little imagination to create an awesome user experience.
Note: the article contains many images.
From the very beginning I’d like to admit that I’m not a professional web designer. Sometimes I love to draw, and sometimes I even have to do it. In this article I’m not going to teach you design. We are not a specialized design studio. Design is usually provided by the client or we interact with third-party agencies. The only two things we have to deal with are slicing and technical design.
An initial design concept may often undergo changes in the course of its integrating with the functional part. Besides, designers do not always draw every single page and every state/behavior. We have to do these things called technical design by ourselves.
An ability to do something quickly is essential, and I’m going to share some helpful tricks saving a lot of time. In addition, I would like to give a few examples of best practices we have noticed while working with different designers.
I think most of you will agree that when it comes to websites, design really matters! Sometimes that’s what the whole project is about. The time has passed when visual representation bore less importance than content. “Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.
There are some patterns that are quite easy to spot in other people’s design styles. Let’s take a moment to look at web design trends we’ve witnessed over the last couple of years. Of course, it is not the ultimate list but, in our opinion, it contains the most widely used techniques.
Note: The article contains many images.
We’ve already tried a bunch of project management/issue tracking systems: (Pivotal Tracker, RedMine, Basecamp, Podio).
In one way or another, they always seemed lacking some features, confusing or just a pain in the rear :). If a tool was good enough for project managers, it turned out to be confusing for developers and vice versa. It is extremely important for us that developers enjoy using a certain toolkit since as a result they do a better job.
Launching and running your own startup company is a very popular topic nowadays. Tons of stories on the Web tell us about huge investments in hottest startups, and sometimes these investments seem to be easy money. People begin to strongly believe that VC is crucial and one can’t build a viable company without it. However, we often forget that lots of companies (even the most up-and-coming) have never get venture capital funding, especially outside the IT world. The most successful teams around the world haven’t relied on investing, they focused on developing great products in the first place. So third-party funds are not necessarily the only option.
Is it possible to create something decent without investments? And what are the pros and cons of both external funding and so-called bootstrapping?
Starting my own company, I’ve faced these problems and made up my mind on that score. Here are my team’s and my own thoughts and opinions regarding this hot issue.
I think many of you have come across micromanagers who tend to exercise excessive control trying to check your every single step and be aware of every tiny detail. Such behavior is not always guided by bad intentions, sometimes people just do not understand how their attitude may affect employees’ productivity and sincerely believe their “active” involvement will help tasks be done better.
However, everything has its limit, and bringing management to the extreme is not usually worth it.
Let’s talk about advantages and disadvantages of a micromanaging approach and see if it can be avoided.