New Gig

Today officially marks my first day at SB Stone. I thought a post was warranted to talk about what we are trying to do and how open source, .net, mobile, all the fancy buzzwords are part of it.

I am the first full time dev in what the company is calling our "interactive" division. SB as a whole really has 4 main markets, staff augmentation, IT services, support and this new interactive group.

So what does interactive mean? Well... really all it means is we want to build a "studio" style dev wing where we do both project work for third party clients, as well as build our own products to market and resell. We're hoping the project works supports the dev time needed for our own things until those become profitable. Also as with anything some will hit and some will miss.

So why did I come over here? Mainly because the new group wants to build a new brand and image for the company, a large part of which will be participating and contributing to the dev and tech community. That means participating at and speaking at conferences, sharing knowledge through blog posts / twitter / user groups, all of it.

From a tech standpoint our group is looking at a mix of .NET and Open Source tools, specifically Ruby on Rails (although we have PHP resources as well.) We're also training up on mobile including iOS and eventually Android so a whole lot of different tools. My role from a marketing perspective is mostly going to be focused on the Rails side though. So hopefully in the near future I'll be going to more ruby conferences and events to talk to people about what we're doing and how Rails is playing in the marketplace.

The thing i'm most excited about though is building out a proper agile dev team. Earlier today we committed to following Kanban via Agile Zen for my first project, and hopefully many more going forward. We're adhering to test driven development, continuous integration and emergent design as well. The only "hot" agile practice we aren't going quite yet is pairing, and only for lack of collocated people (and remote pairing, in my opinion, sucks.)

So that's what I'm up to. If your an independent or even a full timer looking to help us out let me know. We're always looking for contractors to keep available and we'll hopefully be building up more of an in house team in the coming months. Even more importantly if you know of any small businesses looking for rails / php / .net help LET ME KNOW :-)