If you’ve been a fan of the Ranch for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve grown… a lot… very quickly.

We took some reflective time this summer and built a new structure for our team that for years to come will support our students, our clients and, most importantly, our Nerds. It puts us in position to solve more problems, explore new technologies, develop new courses, write more Big Nerd Ranch Guides and grow the expertise of our Nerds.

Engineering

I think the biggest, most impactful change is the promotion of Adam Preble to VP of engineering. (You may also know his name as the August Big Nerd of the Month.) Adam has assembled a team of internal leaders to guide our engineering teams.

Brandy Porter is the director of design. She will continue to manage our graphic designers and UI/UX designers.

Brian Hardy is now our director of iOS. He manages our iOS experts and and has named Bolot Kerimbaev, Christian Keur, Peter Battaglia and Rod Strougo as team managers.

Chris Aquino will serve as director of Frontend/HTML5. He oversees the growing team of experts on our web team.

Chris Stewart is now director of Android. He will lead our team of Android developers and instructors. He’s named Kristin Marsicano as Android team manager.

Step Christopher is the director of products. He will manage our team of experts developing apps like Roominant and eClicker.

Steven Harman has been named director of backend. He manages our team of Ruby and Ruby on Rails experts. The backend team managers are Brandon Beacher, Don Pottinger and Jonathan Wallace.

Operations

Earlier this year we named Emily Herman the VP of operations, and her curiosity and analytical thinking has already led to numerous improvements. The operations team ensures that we nimbly deliver the most rewarding bootcamps for our students and develop problem-solving apps for our clients.

The operations team includes:

Aubrey Rhodes has transitioned to director of consulting operations. He partners with the project strategists (Jenn Green, Sara Kablak and Marcus Owens) to manage the processes we employ to deliver software to our clients.

Chris Kelly is the director of internal operations and is tasked with making our internal processes and tools more efficient and effective.

Jenn, Sara and Marcus, our project strategists, kick off, manage and see to successful completion all of our projects. They connect with clients and developers to ensure projects are on track, deadlines are being met and both sides are meeting their obligations to develop the best possible solution. (And let me add, we are quite fortunate to have them on our team!)

Marcel Speller is the managing director of Big Nerd Ranch Europe, with responsibility for our training and consulting business in Europe. Based in Amsterdam but with a continental reach, he works closely with Jon Woodroof, director of sales in Europe, and Birgit Reizevoort, our training coordinator.

Shannon Cobourn is the director of training operations and manages the delivery, evaluation, and continuous improvement of open enrollment bootcamps and corporate training courses. Nicole Rej serves as the training facilitator and Agnes Mackintosh is the training coordinator.

Business Development

Jason Russell has consolidated business development for training and consulting as VP of Business Development. He and his team will grow our relationship with our clients, students and community; identify potential new opportunities, locations and markets; and expand our consulting and training business.

Jami Sieder serves as director of training business development. She oversees the expansion of open enrollment bootcamps and corporate training classes. Juan Pablo Claude works with Jami as the Big Nerd Ranch ambassador to Latin America, to grow our presence and offerings there.

LeAnn Boucher remains the director of PR/marketing. Together with Tasha Schroeder, marketing manager, they manage external communications, social media, sponsorships and the Big Nerd Blog.

Mathew Jackson is our business development representative. He is responsible for sales of our consulting and corporate training offerings.

Finance and HR

Stacy Henry, our CFO, is responsible for our finance and HR functions. She and her team make sure we’re able to sustain our business. They forecast growth, collect payments and, in turn, pay our Nerds and vendors. I can’t say enough about how important this department is to our viability.

The finance team includes Felicia Harris, accountant; San Smith, office manager; and Katie Torres, HR representative. Katie works with Sarah Koger, our Nerd evangelist, tasked with recruiting talented new developers to Big Nerd Ranch.

Chief Learning Officer

Aaron Hillegass remains our Chief Learning Officer, working with our authors and instructors to maintain the highest quality content and teaching methods. And, as the “man in the cowboy hat,” he is also a frequent speaker. (Check out his CocoaConf Atlanta keynote next week!)

The changes I’ve detailed here are topline and capture just the biggest changes. I am fortunate to be surrounded by the most brilliant, kind and hardworking people I know, and there are more to this team (about 113 of us total) who make Big Nerd Ranch what it is: home of the Nerds.

If you want to be part of this unique place we’ve built, check out our job openings and apply!

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I’m excited to share with you some great news about Highgroove Studios. As of yesterday afternoon, we have merged with the Big Nerd Ranch.

The Big Nerd Ranch is a team of expert developers, specializing in training and consulting on mobile development. Over the years, they’ve hosted thousands of students at the Ranch, helped some of the biggest companies in the world (such as Samsung, Nokia, Google, AOL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Adobe) and soon-to-be-big companies realize their programming goals.

I will be the CEO of the combined company, and Aaron Hillegass, former CEO of Big Nerd Ranch, will become our CLO (Chief Learning Officer). In this role, Aaron will focus primarily on writing and speaking, developing course materials, and professional development for all technical staff.

What does this mean to our clients? It means that we just got better at everything our clients have been asking for. You will benefit from end-to-end development on mobile applications and a deep understanding of training and expertise-transfer. Our continued goal of happy clients and happy developers will only get more amazing. Our team, and thus, your team, just got bigger both in terms of expertise, knowledge, systems and support.

What will become of the Highgroove name and brand? The name goes away. The reputation and respect that Highgroove has achieved, the people and the ethos of Highgroove live on, but all of that will happen in a company with a different name.

What about pricing? Who’s on my project? This announcement does not change your current project, rates or iteration schedule.

I would also like to take this time to thank you for being awesome clients and supporters. Your thoughts, ideas, suggestions and feedback continue to inspire us to build an awesome company.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or our Client Advocate, Jenn Green.

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As Highgroovers slowly trickle in to our brand new digs at the Stoveworks, I’m happy to report that this “Iteration” of the office is awesome.

How did we go from having no office (a few years ago) to this?

A long time ago (back in 2006 to be exact), Highgroove had no office. I worked from home, from coffee shops, or traveled to our clients. About 2.5 years ago, I came to visit a friend, Mike Landman of Ripple IT at his office. I met with him, and remembered having to take a phone call, and asking if I could just plop down at one of the extra desks in his office for a few minutes to take the call.

Two hours later, I realized that having a desk at an office was a nice change of pace, and made me super productive. I asked Mike if I could rent a desk. “Sure thing,” he said. Pretty soon I was renting 2 desks, then 3, then 4, then a tiny room, and then the front section of his office. When it came time for Ripple to move, they asked if we wanted to go with them, to share the next office. We were ecstatic to share another office with a great company.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, and we out-grew our space. It was time to leave the nest. We started looking for space, and even gave up on our first search. Nothing quite fit the bill. We knew, because we had a document outlining the needs of the first office space (at Ripple), and the next Iteration – this space. It had all the things that worked, and all the things that didn’t quite work. It also had a list of the top things we wanted, and we sorted that list to the top priority (kind of sounds like Iterative Development of software).

We are so proud of this space. It truly reflects our amazing culture of personable developers, optimistic and trusting – true craftsmen (and women) iterating on everything.

We’ll be posting more pics today and all this week of our favorite features of the new office. Come stop by for a tour.

Image credit: twotoneatl (Jon Woodroof)

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It’s true. We’re hiring. Like a lot of technology companies. But, did you know that we are turning down many qualified applicants? Since we started tracking, only 11% of applicants who go through our hiring process become “Hired Full Time” employees of Highgroove. That means about 1 in 10 who apply receive an offer letter. Why is it we can–or rather why we have– to be so picky in who we hire?

Hiring is hard. Ask any growing company or entrepreneur (or a team of entrepreneuring developers) what’s their hardest challenge and they’ll tell you–it’s hiring the right people.

As President of Highgroove, my entire function is to put the right people on the bus, and that means both developers and clients. Many of our clients (and soon-to-be-clients) recognize that our secret sauce is what makes us awesome. It’s what makes us a tremendous value for smart CTOs looking to gain an edge in building ruby and rails backed web applications. So with all this demand for development, why are we turning folk down?

It really comes down to culture. Highgroove has a unique company culture that cannot be bent or compromised by bringing unqualified people on the team. It’s one of our competitive advantages, and to quote David Cummings:

Corporate culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage that is completely within the control of the entrepreneur. Develop a strong corporate culture first and foremost.

– The Top 3 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know.

This culture is impossible to summarize in a sentence or blurb, but is quantified in numerous ways from our “Bias Towards Action” mantra, to our values we reiterate consistently in our Highgroove Award, to even how we structure the company.

“Having a great company culture” isn’t even new in the management world. It’s not unique to technology companies, either. This is why we promote competitive events like a Latte Art Competition, hiring a personal trainer on-staff, and sponsoring a bicycle race/club team.

To make sure we’re a good fit, we use a variety of tools including a hiring process centered around Topgrading (Topgrading: The Secret to Hiring A Players), and hyper-focused on the culture fit equation. No, we don’t have any silly programming challenges that don’t mean anything to anyone except the interviewee trying to prove how smart they are.

So, it’s not enough for a potential candidate to be a programming “expert”–in fact, it’s not even mandatory that a candidate be a Ruby/Rails guru. We’re not hiring for that. We’re hiring professionals who fit our culture. If a candidate aligns with our company culture (and they’ll find out quickly in our extensive, in-depth hiring process), interviews with us, and makes it on-board, they’ll be doing Ruby and Rails their first day. And in our bootcamp, once on-board, they’ll learn more of the Right Way to do development, and be doing client work and internal work soon there after.

Are you curious if you would be a good fit at Highgroove? Check out our available positions and apply!

(Editor’s note: As commented below, CBQ fully explains the Highgroove hiring process in this How2Hire webinar with The Resumator.)

Image Credit: balloo from f0nq.com http://www.f0nq.com/8/rock-and-roll-surf-ninja

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Startup Weekend in Atlanta kicked off last night with over 116 participants, and 48 pitches, eventually forming into 18 teams. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to start something up – a concept, business, or idea, over the weekend. It’s centered around technology, with people dividing themselves into categories like: “business folk”, “designers”, “developers”, and other niches. Yup, there was a technology lawyer, there too.

What kinds of ideas are being worked on right now?

I took quick notes on all the pitches, and here are some trends:

• Crowdsourcing – ideas pitched on crowd-sourced recipes, carpooling, ticket/event booking, and educational ideas
• Gamification – making a game out of education, fantasy sports (fantasy daily sports),
• Photo sharing – and even photo manipulation around faces (think: a light version of photoshop to make you look sexy)
• Jobs and finding talent – ideas were pitched on eliminating recruiting
• Online Dating – and to an extent, verifying who is who, and finding folk through your social network

The micro trend of the night (in my opinion) was: “making something sexy” – be it “sexy discounted cash flows” (best pitch of the night), your own photo of yourself, and even one team wanting help making their Ruby on Rails app sexy!

We’re happy to be a part of this event, as sponsors, along with friends Mailchimp, Pardot, Appcelerator, Peer1 Hosting, and even Microsoft to name a few!

Stop by our table and say hello, if you’re around!

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The StartupRiot MAKE event kicked off last night at ATDC with the help of Sanjay Parekh and some very awesome sponsors and teams.

We’re happy to be a part of this awesome event. At 5 pm on Friday, teams started trickling in and sponsors started setting up displays. The food arrived and many people began networking and planning already.

At 6 pm, Sanjay announced the teams, and each team got up and spoke about what they were building, and what they needed – be it a designer, some mobile development help, or back-end development.

There are some awesome prizes, but I am pretty sure the teams that are here, while they are happy to win, are actually here because they enjoy making and building things using technology. You can actually tell, because in addition to building products (we’ve already seen a few working demos), they’re helping each other, offering encouragement, and feedback.

A few of us from Highgroove are here this weekend offering help in the form of knowledge and programming chops. Since we’ve built products and services for companies both big and soon-to-be-big, we’re pretty opinionated about what we’ve seen that works and doesn’t work in a modern web application. Our actual real service, though, that we’re offering is something that comes natural to us: “Just Keeping it Simple” and saying “No” to:

• complicated features (keep it simple!)
• overly generic solutions (hyper-specialize instead)
• building it yourself (instead of leveraging open source)
• scaling too soon (start small, scale later)

Good luck teams!

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This week’s Tech Talk was on Visualizing Scaling, and Consistent Hashing techniques for scaling data.

Patrick talked through several visualizations he created in HTML5 to visually explain many common scaling techniques.

If you’ve heard of the techniques and algorithms: “sharding” or “master-slave”, or even “consistent hashing” for distributing data across servers, but never really known how they work, this talk goes through the basics and shows visually how data can be scaled out across multiple servers.

“I never really understood some of these techniques until I saw them visually”, says Patrick, who has implemented many of these techniques for Highgroove’s many clients. He details the pros and cons and even how and when to start considering these techniques for scaling.

Check out the animations here on Github:

https://github.com/vanstee/distributed-data

And, be sure to check out the video on Vimeo:

Consistent Hashing Tech Talk

Interested in attending (or even presenting) at our weekly Tech Talks? Check out our upcoming events.

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Dave’s Tech Talk this week is on security on web applications, focusing on Ruby on Rails applications, and using the static analysis security scanner called Brakeman (brakeman on github).

In this talk, Dave looks at how static security analyzers work, and how we used it to find some very tiny (already fixed within a few minutes of finding) possible security weak-points in an application we built for a client.

Static analysis looks at your source code and looks for known vulnerabilities. As opposed to dynamic scanners, or intrusion “detection” scanners that scan a live site from the outside – these are run on the code itself.

In Ruby this is hard because it’s a dynamic language. Because of this, Brakeman (and any static analysis scanners) will identify “false positives” (code that isn’t necessarily a vulnerability) but they’re easy to track down, and safely ignore.

Dave notes, that because of Ruby’s dynamic-ness, if you are doing a lot of method_missing meta-programming, it won’t be able to analyze your code. The practices and places it does identify are easy to see, and you can apply Brakeman’s other recommendations in your meta-programming code, to secure your web application.

Check out the talk on Vimeo: Tech Talk on Brakeman

Image Credit: fishywang on Flickr

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Highgroove hosted our monthly Hack Night, and with 20 attendees, this was our largest yet.

To program a computer in a clever, virtuosic, and wizardly manner. Ordinary computer jockeys merely write programs; hacking is the domain of digital poets. Hacking is a subtle and arguably mystical art, equal parts wit and technical ability, that is rarely appreciated by non-hackers. See hacker. – Urban Dictionary: hack

Hack Nights are a chance for Highgroovers to simply “hack” which means: to experiment, learn, and play with technologies we might not get to during our day-to-day. So, what did we hack on?

• the io language using Day 1 of the io chapter in the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book
• game programming (the wolfbrain) on the Sifteo Game Cubes in C#
• a remote music playing server with voting and control from our chat room for the office
• adding functionality to some of our favorite ruby gems and libraries including brakeman, and a yet-unreleased crazy-math backend algorithm solver
• an iOS app for awarding Highgroovers the coveted Highgroove Award
• a search-across-the-company app using some new search technologies powered by Ruby
• and much, much more….

Thanks to all who came out. Stay tuned for our next Hack Night in February by liking us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Will’s Tech Talk this week is on Riak. “Riak is an open source, highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed database.” – Riak Overview on Basho.com.

The main use-case is to use in web applications that have heavy requirements for data, where lots of data must be “written” or “read” in a distributed fashion, but needs to be high-availability.

Will also went over one of the main Ruby libraries named ripple that is a rich Ruby modeling layer for Riak, Basho’s distributed database that contains an ActiveModel-based document abstraction.

Riak works great when your database gets painful. If you have an application that just has tons of writes, or tons of reads happening, and the database is just dragging, Riak is a great choice for storing and reading data quickly. Adding Riak along-side your database to alleviate performance is a great way to scale out and make your web application more performant.

Check out the video on our Tech Talks page: http://vimeo.com/highgroove/videos

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