It’s no secret that Big Nerd Ranch is known around the world for developing mobile apps and teaching mobile app development. As the company grew, we headquartered our European office in Amsterdam and have been thriving ever since.

In our efforts to expand that presence even further, I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined our talented team in Amsterdam as the European Sales Director.

Opening credits

And what a team it is. Our European staff has grown to not only serve more clients, but to expand our course offerings.

Marcel Speller is the managing director of Big Nerd Ranch Europe. He leads the team here and spearheads our training and consulting business in Europe.

Birgit Reizevoort is our training coordinator. She ensures that both students and instructors have all they need in order to make trainings go smoothly.

Bolot Kerimbaev is iOS Team Manager and Instructor. You’ll often find him teaching classes or speaking at conferences throughout Europe.

Graham Lee supports both our Atlanta and Amsterdam offices and teaches our iOS courses. He is the author of Test-Driven iOS Development and APPropriate Behaviour.

Rajiv Jhoomuck is an iOS developer who creates mobile apps for our clients.

Siemen Sikkema develops iOS and Mac OS X apps for clients.

We teach Android, Beginning iOS and Advanced iOS bootcamps at our European Ranch as well.

As for me, I joined Big Nerd Ranch nearly two years ago. At first, I focused on backend web development clients, but my sales expertise quickly grew to include native apps, frontend development and design projects.

When the opportunity arose for me to take the spot in Amsterdam, I leapt at the chance. I have spent some time living in Germany and speak German fluently. I’ve long been interested in international business and have earned a master’s degree in the subject. In the past, I’ve worked at an Atlanta-based translation and language testing company, where I was first exposed to cultural considerations and global market details on a per-project basis.

Meanwhile, back in Atlanta…

Before I departed for Amsterdam, Big Nerd Ranch hired Mathew Jackson as our Business Development Representative. Mathew came to us after working for Apple, and he is all the things every Nerd here aspires to be: brilliant, kind and hardworking. He knows how to help clients find the solutions they need and strives to provide the best service possible.

The next chapter

Our team in Amsterdam has been working tirelessly to spread the Nerd word throughout Europe, and I’m glad to be on board. I look forward to the many amazing opportunities Big Nerd Ranch Europe has in this part of the world, and the work that lies ahead. I’m keen to learn as much as possible and improve my Dutch zo snel mogelijk.

I will have more to report here on the blog soon, but in the meantime, don’t hesitate to contact us for your consulting and training needs. And if there’s an event I should attend, tweet at me and let me know!

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(Photo courtesy Benedict Herzberg)

Much of my life is about finding the groove where learning, bikes and app development intersect. Little did I know that my time in Berlin for GOTO would align with that theme so well. I attended GOTO to learn as much as I could from the brilliant attendees, and to continue my mission of further exposing the European community to Big Nerd Ranch.

Excited to have introduced @helloworldbln & @komoot! Talking bikes, apps, Berlin and beyond. #komoot… http://t.co/cvd3BDmchq

— Jon Woodroof (@twotoneatl) October 16, 2013

In what should be no surprise to anyone who knows me, my first stop off the plane was to both procure wheels for transportation in the city and to connect some local dots. I reached out to Jonas of Komoot, whom I met when Big Nerd Ranch attended SXSWi earlier this year, and suggested we meet at Hello World Berlin, where I’d be renting a vintage steel Italian steed for the following few days. Sdoe and Jonas, though both in the same scene in such a small city as Berlin, did not know each other, and we had a coffee while learning about one another’s businesses. They immediately had the inclination to team up and offer custom routes for Hello World Berlin bike renters through the Komoot app. I was thrilled—and equipped with a wonderful means to navigate Berlin.

“Learn fast, learn often (not fail fast, fail often) as a successor to risk reduction”… http://t.co/pEMmdD8Yye

— Jon Woodroof (@twotoneatl) October 17, 2013

Once at GOTO, I heard Alistair Cockburn, GOTO keynote speaker and initiator of the agile movement, use the phrase “Learn fast, learn often!.” This saying embodied the spirit of the conference for me, and the broad spectrum of new things to learn is precisely why I would recommend the GOTO conference. Among the new things I learned about while at GOTO:

1. The pros and cons of graceful degradation vs. continuous integration.

2. The challenges of migrating a technology stack in a rapidly growing company through Zalando’s story of changing from PHP/MySQL to Java/PostgresSQL.

3. Great examples of in-app search by Simon Willnauer, who discussed ElasticSearch’s Apache Lucene-powered and schema-free search engine.

Before I started at Big Nerd Ranch, these topics would have been Greek to me, and I was excited to be benefiting so greatly from the discussions.

It’s hard to choose from among the many talks I attended, but here are my top picks:

1. The App Universe After the Big Bang from Mike Lee of Appsterdam. Mike talked about the changes in productized apps and asked, “Where do we go from here? What kinds of ideas are worth pursuing?”

2. The Epistemology of Software by former Twitter engineer Nathan Marz, where he shared his belief that a. you cannot perfectly reason through software, and b. the best you can do is minimize wrongness.

3. The Challenge of Craft by Dave West, author of Ars Magna. This was a very compelling talk that discussed how reality, a CAS (complex adaptive system), is being redefined through technology. The Craft lies in the understanding of the CAS, and in the knowledge and experience required to make the right change at the right time in the right place to ensure that the CAS is in a better state than it was before.

Lastly, I’d be remiss not to mention my opportunity to attend CreativeMornings Berlin. This talk continued the theme of disciplined learning, but through the lens of play. Check out Ole’s talk here.

My trip to Germany gave me the opportunity learn as much as I could, and I enjoyed connecting with attendees from all over the globe. What are your favorite takeaways from the recent conferences you have attended, and what future events in Germany should I be sure not to miss?

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At Highgroove, we’re no surgeons, but the folks at Hope Builds are. Though we aren’t trained to use scalpels, we’re really good at writing Rails applications, and that’s just what they needed to make their surgical work more effective.

Among other projects, Hope Builds, an Atlanta-based non-profit, improves the standard of living in under-served neighborhoods by providing medical treatment.

Earlier this year, we partnered with them to equip their mobile surgical missions and health education outreach programs in Africa with a web app to make them more efficient so they can focus on patients, not paperwork.

Hope Builds’ mobile surgical missions

More than 100 volunteer medical professionals make up the Hope Builds mobile surgical missions team. Together, they serve huge numbers of people: For example, in the summer of 2011, the program planned to provide medical treatment to 10,000 residents and perform more than 300 surgeries in one Nigerian state alone. Hope Builds provides these services free of charge because patients would otherwise have to forgo care—most patients earn less than $1 a day.

How we helped Hope Builds

Over the course of two pro-bono iterations, Gregg built the MVP of an app that allows surgeons and other Hope Builds volunteers to:

1. track patients and surgical operations performed during missions.

2. store and access basic patient information such as name, age, sex and location, along with a photograph.

Because internet connectivity is limited in rural Africa, the app enables basic record creation and retrieval through SMS messaging. Since it’s a web application, a surgeon can log a surgery and the information is immediately available and backed up for users around the world, removing the potential for lost paper records. This is hugely helpful for Hope Builds as they grow, and we were honored to be a part of their global effort!

Helping others

Highgroove is committed to making the world a better place through better code, and organizations often have specific needs that can be solved by custom web applications. If you are affilated with a 501(c)(3) that could benefit from some pro-bono Ruby development, give me a shout!

Image credit: DieselDemon

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All of the non-developer employees here at Highgroove recently spent a day with Andrew Fuqua for a hands-on agile training, where he took us on a quick tour of a full iterative project. We planned a project and learned to create measurable steps toward our goals.

Most importantly, I learned that agile isn’t just for developers—it’s useful for everyone. The agile principles can apply to all of us.

1. Work Together Daily

“Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

Fundamentally, the agile principles are about software development, but close collaborative work environments can benefit anyone. At Highgroove, we harness the personable nature of each member of our team, and this makes us all better co-workers, consultants and contributors to the results we deliver every day.

2. Face-to-Face Communication is Best

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

Whenever possible, we meet face to face for important meetings: iteration kickoffs, retrospectives and huddles. This may be one of the more obvious pieces of wisdom that agile offers, but it’s easy to overlook the value of an in-person conversation. Whether it is rapidly iterating on features or sharing more about our process with a prospective client, face time is time well spent!

3. Does it Work?

“Working software is the primary measure of progress.”

Working software at Highgroove means actual, live, launched, usable software. A feature is not done until it has been deployed. Checking something off your list is a gratifying experience. But think carefully about tasks: Did I close that deal? Did I actually fix that broken cabinet? Halfway doesn’t count. Don’t mislead yourself or others! Is a task done or not?

4. Satisfy the Customer

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

Every project at Highgroove has a continuous build. In a Ruby on Rails project, this means one line or one “step” deployment to a server. This tenet is applicable outside of software development, too: small pieces of effort, applied frequently, help us all achieve goals and complete tasks. And if you focus on frequent communication, you can get feedback right away, not two weeks from now.

5. Change is Your Friend

“Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”

From day one of our sales process, I strive to help potential clients realize that every one of the features on their projects can be re-worked and re-prioritized at any time, based on business goals. Variations on our sales map or unexpected updates to a proposal occasionally cause me to change course, but the end product ends up being better.

6. Deliver Frequently

“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

All of us at Highgroove live and die by iterations on a weekly timeframe.  I’ve learned that I am more effective if I divide my work by how it best fits into my week. You can avoid crunch time by focusing on tighter, smaller and more granular tasks that can be accomplished sooner.

7. Best Tools, Best People

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

It’s no secret that we’re hiring and that we’re meticulous about building our team. Once someone is on board, we give them the tools they need and trust them to do a great job.

8. Cadence

“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”

If a single agile tenet resonated most with me as a cyclist, this would be the one. It requires focus to determine the best way to achieve results sustainably, while avoiding burnout and ensuring maximum efficiency. Find your rhythm!

9. Always Improve

“Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”

At Highgroove, the best idea wins, no matter who thought of it. Sharing ideas is core to our iterative process, whether it’s via code reviews, colleague comments, or an external source. If a good improvement is suggested, it’ll be implemented.

10. Keep it Simple

“Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.”

Basically, this boils down to “less is more.” In my role as Director of Business Development, this point is most poignant for me: Will a simple, personable call connect best, or is a short and sweet email preferable? The best route is often the simplest one.

11. Self-Organization

“The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”   We’re all a part of a team with a larger goal: delivering quality work. If you need help, ask for it. If you can give help, lend it. Improving a team effort doesn’t require permission or outside direction.

12. Be Retrospective

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

Set aside time to reflect: “What’s awesome? What could be more awesome?” Get input from someone who isn’t involved in the project: a friend, a colleague or a friendly fellow MARTA commuter. Think about what can be done better, and what needs to change. The “what” (not “who”) is key here; the goal is creating actionable steps to change for the better.

Which agile principles resonate with you professionally or personally? Bias towards action and comment below!

The post Not a Developer? Not a Problem! Agile is for everybody! appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

At Highgroove we love to iterate and bias towards action. Our Best Practices and Patterns are not set in stone, in fact they, like the software preferred by our team, are public and open to feedback from anyone. We are constantly looking for the best tools and approaches to staying productive and solving the problems we encounter every day.

Last week Chris put our ‘bias towards action’ philosophy in motion and lined up a Tech Talk from Sprintly co-founder Joe Stump with a tweet. Read on to learn more about Sprintly and why we’re excited to try it out.

Sprintly is a simple project management tool that caught our eye to try out on some upcoming projects. It is designed to remove some frustrations for developers and provide non-engineers insight into what is going on without being overwhelmed with jargon. It’s process and UI also facilitate non-developers contributing to the backlog. I personally am excited about the top-level overview it provides into what Highgroovers are working on and how projects are moving along albeit currently for only one project. But we know they are working on ways to make it work for multi-consultant, multi-developer teams. Yet, even in its current state, Sprintly will offer our clients a drag-and-drop way of keeping track of tasks for their respective projects. It also has some great perks of strong, but simple high level per project views of velocity, progress and more.

The succinctly worded Sprintly homepage espouses: ‘Painless software development, Deep email and GitHub integration and that its Easy to learn, hard to live without’. I’ll let Joe share more about Sprintly in his Highgroove Tech Talk that we recorded on June 1st:

2012.06.01 Tech Talk on Sprintly from Highgroove Studios on Vimeo.

For more info visit Sprintly And if you’re not reading Joe’s blog, you should check it out. Follow @joestump & @sprintly on Twitter, too! Lastly, if you’d like to attend or present at an upcoming Tech Talk check out our Events page and get in touch!

How does your team explore new ways to solve problems?

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The Beltline Bikeshop App, Bike Spot, is LIVE and available to install on your iOS device!

If you know us, you know we love bikes here at Highgroove. Any cyclist in Atlanta has encountered the ‘parking’ headache of looking for a spot, much less a rack to lock to while getting around on two wheels. Bike Spot is a bike rack locator designed to track, record, and locate bike racks around town.

Sounds awesome, right? “But how can I use it?” you ask.

So imagine you’re about to embark on a bike ride, and wondering where the nearest bike rack will be. Here’s how the Bike Spot app works:

• Look for the nearest bike rack at your destination – Simply open the app and allow it to pinpoint your location
• Zoom in/out to find the for the closest rack – More are being added regularly but maybe your favorite rack isn’t included yet. Add it!
• Find a new rack, photograph it – The app makes it easy snap a photo of any bike parking
• Promote the app! – This app isn’t only for Atlanta. Its merits apply in any city, any town, anywhere!

Bicycle commuting in Atlanta grew faster than anywhere else in the United States and its no secret that cycling is a positive, healthy way to get from point A to point B!

We’re honored to have had the opportunity to contribute to this collaborative On The House project between with Hybrid Design, Matchstic and the Beltline Bikeshop! A few weeks ago, we swung by the Beltline Bikeshop to celebrate the app’s completion and to check out the shop. The Beltline Bike Shop is a tremendous asset for Atlanta and Highgroove was excited to lend a hand to such a great cause. At the shop, the take donated bikes and invite kids in Southwest Atlanta to earn a bike of their own through community service. More info here.

Visit their website to learn more about the app, or download it from the app store! Download the here or in the app store.

Do your favorite businesses have bike racks? Are they listed in the Bike Spot app yet?

The post The Beltline Bike Shop 'Bike Rack Locator' App appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

Anyone that knows anyone at Highgroove knows we’re not your run of the mill rapidly growing Ruby development shop. We’re a unique team of creative individuals bent on productivity hacking and iterating on client needs until the app is awesome. Sure we’ve got some great perks and compelling reasons to make the commute into the office despite being a ROWE. What do we do at Highgroove as a group to intentionally keep our culture cool/unique as we continue to grow? Read more to learn about we stay keep our groove at Highgroove.

Most everyone at Highgroove pens an entry here on the blog describing their initial days and weeks. Like Will put it, getting into the groove involves getting accustomed to working in a ROWE, following all 12 agile principles and getting on the iterative schedule we use for client facing and internal work. Plus we have Tech Talks, Team Dinners, unlimited vacation and even unorthodox approaches to office life like unassigned seating and having a personal trainer. These are all integral components to what makes the culture at Highgroove awesome!

Andy gave me the idea for this post after reading Karen Rubin’s Harvard Business Review article entitled “How Start-Ups Can Maintain Company Culture While Growing” Karen focused on two of the 12 Things You Might Not Know about company culture at the second fastest growing SaaS company in history: Hubspot. According to her, (and we agree!) the two approaches to keeping Hubspot’s culture vibrant and true to the original vision of the company are communication and measurement.

Here are three examples of what that means to us at Highgroove:

1. The Highgroove Award

   Our award exists on the website and as a physical trophy. The Highgroove Award even ultimately became an app! To us the Highgroove Award is about communication and measurement. It encourages compliments and is a gauge for how we as a team are embodying the Highgroove Values of being Personable, Optimistic, and Trusting, while exercising Craftsmanship in all that we do. At Highgroove, well-deserved compliments foster teamwork, increase morale, and make us better as a team than we could be on our own.

2. Weekly Iterations

   Everything revolves around single, double or 4 week iterations. If something doesn’t work, scrap it. As as our friends at Matchstic said last week: “The best idea wins, no matter where it comes from.” Iterative development relies on this level playing field of communication to stay agile as well as providing the framework for the collaboration we promote in everything that we do. For Highgroove this means, as Chris put it “Iterations hurt [a] developers self esteem. Iterations are great for developer self esteem.” Lastly, we end our iterations on Tuesdays putting any potential crunch time then and not on a Friday or the weekend. Cool, right?

3. Surveys & more!

   At Highgroove we’re constantly looking for ways to gauge employee (and client) happiness. This focus on morale measurement facilitates identifying issues and obstacles as well as determining when and if if we’ve moved beyond them. in fact, we’re working on releasing a public version of some of the things that make Highgroove work smoothly. A internal tool that we use as a “How’s it going?” for projects and organizations that we hope to release soon. Stay tuned!

In the same way we endeavor to participate in and contribute to the Ruby and open source community. In this way we share our approaches to keeping our culture cool and unique, and may help to improve the company culture for other companies around us.

Does your company have a unique culture? How do you keep it that way?

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Last Wednesday CBQ and I attended Startup Riot on behalf of Highgroove. We heard 3 minute pitches (and 3 minutes of questions from an expert panel) from 25 startups. This is easily the biggest event in the Atlanta startup community; missing it is not an option and sponsoring was a no brainer for us. We love working with startups, since we used to be one. Read more to learn about how we sponsored this event, and what we got out of it.

First of all: What is Startup Riot SHOW?

“Startup Riot SHOW is an all-day event which highlights 25 startups through three minute, four slide presentations given by the startups. The startups subsequently answer questions from a judging panel for three minutes. There are a few important aspects that make Startup Riot SHOW different than any other startup conference you’ve heard about or been to.”

Pitching an idea in three minutes isn’t easy. It’s the perfect amount of time for each presenter to not only convey what problem they intend to solve but also how. At Startup Riot, our involvement was not confined to three minutes but rather three events.

Highgroove achieved three goals with our sponsorship:

1. MAKE

   Collaborating: At the MAKE event we blogged live about how we lent a hand to developers there by offering help in the form of knowledge and programming chops. This environment is an extension of how we operate internally: collaborate, iterate and ship it, quick! We love building great web apps and the MAKE event allowed us to share our expertise. In addition to helping establish us as experts at building back-end web applications, we made some great connections and saw some of our open-source libraries for Rails in action, in the wild.

2. JOIN

   Recruiting: At the JOIN event we ran a table to present the allure of what brings the best Ruby developers to work here. A recruiting event is a long-term investment. The people you meet are looking for a great job, but they also know people who are looking for an great job, too. Even if they’re not a good fit for your company, you might have a connection for them, and they might have a connection for you. It’s networking 101, and Startup Riot’s JOIN event has netted us one fantastic hire, and we’ve got a few more in our queue (in our hiring process right now).

3. SHOW

   Networking: And lastly, at the SHOW event we mingled with some Atlanta’s most passionate and capable entrepreneurs. It was personally exciting as a rookie in the startup scene. By the end of the day networking and note taking had paid off. I had signed up for numerous Betas, exchanged cards, and handed out lots of wolfbrain stickers.

Congratulations to viaCycle on winning 1st place! We, of course, couldn’t be happier about more bikes on the streets here in Atlanta. More photos from the event are here. We’re already looking forward to next year, Sanjay.

For more on Startup Riot itself, check out:

• David Cummings Startup Riot 2012 Recap
• Smiley Steve on Startup Riot 2012

How does your company give back to the community that supports you?

Image credit: eyelovelife

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In January of 2012, I very excitedly boarded the Big Nerd Ranch ROWE-boat as our first Account Director.

The month of January left me dazed but not confused. Working in a ROWE environment means results are expected immediately (and that results are all that matter). I hit the ground running and quickly found that everyone here is equally vested each project’s success. That is to say, “the rising tide lifts all boats” here. By leveraging constant communication, the best tools, pair programming, code audits, and project retrospectives—we truly are an agile shop.

After only having been on the job for two months, I am still new but no longer the new guy. Reading Andy’s Post 2 Months in at Highgroove, I feel humbled to be listed alongside some pretty amazing colleagues here, and to be working on amazing projects with even more amazing clients.

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