People who read our blog will know that our first ever Hog Camp concluded last Friday. Hog Camp is hedgehog lab's internal Hack Day that runs over 48 hours and gives us a chance to build, experiment and work with tools and ideas that we would normally not explore in our daily jobs.
The biggest difference in Hog Camp from traditional Hack Days is that everybody participating works towards 1 single idea/solution rather than each individual or small teams working on their own. Our hope was that this encourages team work and help people build on the type of skills that are required in large teams (which is something we usually don't get in a small company like ours).
As expected, it was an intense 2 days of coding, design, discussions and beer+pizza which ended up producing some awesome results. We even managed to get people from outside hedgehog lab interested in the event and we are now opening up our next event to a select list of guests.
Presenting hedgehog lib....
The project our team chose to tackle for the inaugural Hog Camp was a web-based library system that allows us to manage our ever-growing book list and allow a painless and easy way to track their movement.
Unlike most Hack Day projects, hedgehog lib has a very practical purpose; it is going to be used on a near daily-basis internally at hedgehog lab. The core idea behind hedgehog lib was to build something within 48 hours that would have the following functionality.
Allow us to search for and add books to our library (using Google Book Search)
Allow the ability for users to register and check out/check in books to help keep track of who is reading what.
A wishlist feature for people to request books they would like in our library.
Although the final feature set includes a bit more than this, I am glad to report we managed to build and get to a first version of a usable product.
A sneak peek
Free as in free beer
Although hedgehog lib is a great first version, there is plenty of scope to improve the solution and customise it for various needs. To keep with the spirit of the event, we have decide to open source all our future Hog Camp projects in the hope that others will find them useful for their own use or developing the solution further. You can grab the source from our public Hog Camp mercurial repository.
Dan Pink is an author and speaker who despite having worked in politics, has a surprisingly interesting take on managing employees and how the modern workplace should function.
I watched a recent talk of his at TED after being pointed to it by Herb Kim. I would advise anyone who is considering running their own business or has already been running one to watch the talk, which makes a strong fact-based argument for radically re-defining the way we motivate employees at work.
In both his talk at TED and his thought-provoking book A Whole New Mind, Dan talks about right-brain thinking and how creativity is now an essential competitive advantage in the workplace. Like the talk, the book is a must-read for the insight it provides into creativity and how simple it can be to instil it into both your personal and work life.
At hedgehog lab, we have always taken pride in our left-brain strengths and developers with strong logic, reasoning and language skills. Our entire hiring policy and ethos has been surrounded by the fact that we are a company for developers, by developers. Sure there is a lot of creativity and abstract thinking involved in general software development but our work practises and hiring processes were geared towards left-brain focused developers.
We did have processes in place to encourage creativity, like our Lab Days, which were informal internal hack days. Unfortunately, the pressures of every day work and deadlines meant that this process was woefully managed and resulted in very little. In retrospect, this was a necessary but unfortunate path to becoming a sustainable small company.
Meanwhile, in the past year, we turned down around 10 different designers who applied to work at hedgehog lab because I was absolutely convinced that our in-house team had no need for a permanent creative member of staff. Why hire a full-time creative person when we could focus on our core competency[sic] and outsource graphic design and creative work to freelancers and companies skilled at this?
The problem with this was that, although it was good traditional business wisdom, it did not take into account the exponential benefits a creative person could bring to our team and products while changing the monotonous composition of the team. It was becoming clear to us that the advantages of having an in-house designer far outweighed the negatives.
This is where Dan Pink and his theories come into play. To tie in with our recent office move, we took some time off to think about how we can inject some of the creative principles and right-brain culture in hedgehog lab. This essentially culminated in the following new practises that have been brought about at the lab.
Switching to a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)
ROWE is an extension of our existing working practises to focus on results and move the focus away from time spent on a particular task. We have always had a liberal working policy at hedgehog lab but we have often been guilty of focusing too much on measuring and evaluating the amount of time spent by individuals in "doing stuff". Although results were still more important than time in the past, a formalised ROWE process gives us better guidelines and tools to measure and motivate employees in the future.
Monthly "Hog Camp"
Hog Camp is essentially our version of the Google 20% time (where each engineer gets to spend 20% of their time working on interesting and non-core projects). Unlike Google however, our growth rate is far slower, which means we could not afford a day a week from employees' time. Hog Camp is a monthly internal 2-day BarCamp where the team gets together every month to hack on interesting ideas and code fuelled by plenty of pizza and beer. Our first Hog Camp is in September and we will posting the results of this soon.
Hiring a designer
We are now actively looking for a creative designer for our team. If you are someone who loves producing beautiful and usable interfaces and "gets design", then please get in touch with us. Alternatively, if you know someone who is looking for a new challenge and is happy working with geeks, let them know about us. We have no specific and rigid criteria as long as you have the right aptitude and principles to fit into hedgehog lab. A creative job application could help too.
No doubt, I will be reporting in a few months what impact these changes have had at hedgehog lab and if there were any negative results.
It was exactly 2 years ago to tomorrow that we moved some basic furniture including broken garden chairs into our first office. If someone had said to me then that we would still be here 2 years on, sailing above the most difficult recession to hit the country in my time, I would definitely have had a good laugh on their account. Yet, I am absolutely delighted to say that hedgehog lab is officially 2 years old now.
In these past 2 years, we have been through some very difficult times and some absolutely delightful moments but the following were the lows and highs that have shaped our company and the team, as they are today.
Lows
Running out of savings and credit cards
When we founded hedgehog lab, Mark (my co-founder) and I were probably the most ill-suited for entrepreneurship. We both had big mortgages, very well paid jobs and very little savings.
Yet, our passion and conviction about the business and what we wanted to do was so strong that we decided to drop everything, risking a lot of money to pursue what was closest to our hearts. We used up every penny of our cash savings and went through a torrential first few months without generating much revenue. We even had to resort to borrowing from credit cards to fund our work with no real guaranteed revenue. It was simply dogged persistence and hard work that pulled us through this.
Letting go of staff
The most painful moment in our short history had to be the moment we had to let go of our first 3 employees in 2008. Facing delays in the release of our first product fixx, little cash in the bank, and the loss of a large consultancy project we were banking on, we reluctantly had to let go of 3 wonderful employees. I am sure every entrepreneur will tell you this but the morning of the day we broke the news to them felt like the gloomiest day we ever had.
I remember how terrible Mark and I felt the rest of the week, and just turning up for work every day was an uphill climb. Yet, we knew that we took the right decision for the business and thanks to quick but painful decision making, the company is far stronger in the long run.
Market Research
We always knew that we were going to build, fixx, our bug tracking system, as our first product. The advice we got from Business Link (a Government-funded start-up support organisation) was to conduct market research and talk to prospective customers about the product. Since market research was a relatively new field to us, and since everybody else seemed to be doing it, we took the bait and set about doing market research.
If you know the bug tracking market, you will find that what we found in our market research was nothing less than a prediction of total doom. However, it always seemed to me that market research was good at comparing features, predicting figures and stats but could never capture the essence of building a "usable" and "simpler" product. We dug our heels in and 2 years later, the evidence points to the fact that we were onto something.
Highs
The highs far outweigh the lows, and this in essence is why we are still passionate about turning up for work every day and have a blast doing what we do. So what were the highs?
Exponential revenue growth
Although it is fairly early to say this, as it stands, we are looking at least 3 digit growth year on year for the first 3 years. We have already made more revenue in the first 3 months of our current financial year than in the entire last financial year, and are looking to triple our revenues in the next 10 months.
Exceptional people
We have had the chance to work with some brilliant people, both in our current team and previous team. It is an absolute pleasure to go to work every day knowing that everyone there comes into work rearing to go and with a lot of passion for what they do. It also helps that they have a great sense of humour.
I wanted to do a longer post on the specific lessons we have learned in business as a young company, but I remember a talk I gave a couple of months ago at a local event that sums up our lessons in business.
Hi, I'm Rob, the latest addition to the team here at hedgehog lab. I started here last Monday, and I've been given a rather large task with a equally large and looming deadline.
I am the Product Manager for solomon, and I will be leading all aspects of this project, including all of the development. I am eager to launch a beta release in early May, so I will be spending April solely working on Solomon. You can sign up for beta preview to help us squish any bugs and get an early look at what we are doing. I am looking forward to running this project, and if you have any queries or feature requests you can get in touch with me on our Get Satisfaction forums and I'll be more than happy to help.
I've been spending my first week analysing the requirements and design for Solomon and familiarising myself with the environment and the technologies that it uses. The atmosphere here at "the lab" is great, it's a fairly small office with five of us working in close proximity. The discussions we have about projects or problems usually involves scooting a chair over to desk-share or drawing everything up on the whiteboard, which give us a very flexible and productive environment.
I joined the lab straight from University, where I attained a MSc in Computer Security and Resilience. Being given this much responsibility immediately is a welcome challenge, It should give me plenty of project management experience, and I must admit I enjoy being given the snazzy title of "Product Manager" at the age of 22!
Outside of work and education, I spend a lot of time exploring new technologies; I recently learned Flex and Adobe AIR, and I have a feeling there might be some fancy new applications in the pipeline using the Fixx and Solomon APIs.
My life isn't all computers and coffee though: I am heavily involved in the South Shields volunteer lifeguard club; I teach lifesaving, give safety talks in schools and during the summer I spend as many days lifeguarding on the beach as possible.
For those of you interested in what Solomon will look like, here is a preview of the contacts feature:
I intend to follow Damian's trend of blogging snippets of product insights periodically, so as soon as the beta of Solomon is out you can expect to be hearing a lot more from me. Goodbye for now, there's code calling...
Yay! It's finally here. I am excited to report that we have just released fixx 1.6, which has some exciting features that you have been requesting.
The highlights of this release are,
The REST API is finally here. It is limited but a great start. You can access the documentation for the API by upgrading to 1.6 and going to /api.jsp in your fixx installation. If you would like to see specific functionality in the API please request it.
Hi everyone, I'm Damian - the newest recruit to join hedgehog lab. My official title is Product Manager (manager at only 22 years of age!), which means it's my role to manage and run development of fixx, solomon and Product X (the mystery will soon be unveiled) so we can all get plush new Audis.
I like the fact that straight away, I have been put in a position with a fair bit of responsibility, which is great as it means I get to experience all areas of business and I'm able to directly shape the future of our products. So if you have any queries or features you want for upcoming versions, I'm your go-to guy to make this happen - damian@hedgehoglab.com or alternatively add suggestions to our forums.
On this note, we are getting ready to release a new version of fixx early next year (1.6), with a 2.0 release being planned for summer 2009 which I'll be heavily involved in...get ready for some big changes!
I also want to take this opportunity to quickly talk about solomon - our CRM and web-based contact manager, which is looking mighty fine...don't worry you won't have to wait much longer! It'll be worth the wait as you will soon be able to see the thought and experience design that has went into the interface and the performance should be lightning fast with lots of JavaScript (or AJAX for your 2 point ohs) magic binding the entire thing together.
A bit more about myself. My background is in Computer Security and I have joined the lab pretty much straight from Uni. I am one of the cool kids in the lab who work on a Mac, not a PC (hello Mark!), and in my spare time I dabble with Ruby and Java, which is handy as it means I can hit the ground running with both fixx and solomon, which are both developed in Java.
In the short time that I've been here, the things that I really like about working in a start-up are transparency and team discussions. The former is self-explanatory, as it means that no business related subject is taboo. The daily team meetings and discussions are great because I'm able to voice my opinions in a group of very intelligent people. This also means the turn-around on ideas is pretty darn fast too!
I'll leave it here for now, but I suggest you watch this space for some exciting product releases and announcements over the next year.
EventBox looks like a promising native app for Mac OS X. I love it's Growl integration and for a beta, it delivers a great experience on the desktop bringing together my Twitter and Facebook accounts.
I look forward to seeing more services integrated into this and at $20, it is a real steal.
I am pleased to announce the release of fixx 1.5, which is our biggest release yet. The release includes many key bug fixes and improvements along with 2 popular features that have been requested by you.
The new features in 1.5 are,
Brand new time reports for every project (see screenshot below).
Ability to use an existing project as a template for a new project, saving you time re-typing areas, issue types and other meta-data when all your projects are similar.
Although 1.5 does not involve an upgrade to your database, please make sure you back-up your existing fixx installation before you attempt to upgrade.
With fixx 1.4 just around the corner, I wanted to post a sneak preview of our new iPhone interface that we are introducing in fixx.
The initial iPhone interface focuses on 4 core functionality elements. You cannot do everything through the iPhone interface and we wanted to ensure that the features available suited the most common workflow scenarios when using a mobile device.
It is worth noting that this is only the first iteration of iPhone functionality to go into fixx, and future versions will be including additional functionality based on what our customers want. Head over to our forums to request an iPhone feature for fixx.
These are the core features of the iPhone interface in 1.4,
Quick access to view activity and issues relevant to you (using your saved filters).
Last Friday, both Mark Forster and I braved the (short) queue at our local O2 store to grab our new iPhone 3Gs.
I need to make it obvious now that I am an Apple fanboy. Given that I am impressed by everything Apple, I was pretty excited to grab hold of the iPhone 3G, especially for the ability to get to the App Store and download some applications.
The web is already abuzz with iPhone 3G reviews and opinion, so let's skip over that for a minute and concentrate on the new SDK and the applications.
There is absolutely no doubt that the SDK was a step forward and a chance for the iPhone community to develop interesting applications. However, after a week of trying out some popular applications, I must say that I am pretty disappointed with almost every one of them. This is down to 2 factors.
Quality
With the exception of Super Monkey Ball, every single application I have on the iPhone either fails to work (Last.fm, Twitterific), is very slow (Facebook), or is poorly designed (NetNewsWire).
I agree that this has more to do with the developers than anything Apple and I agree that this will get better as time goes by.
Suitability
The bigger issue I have with a lot of the applications is the suitability. Do we really need 10 more native iPhone apps for a To-Do list? Do we really need native iPhone interface to Facebook (I get the point about location-aware data but it really doesn't matter when it comes to Facebook)?
In fact, the best app I have come across on my iPhone (ok! It does still have some quirks), is Google Reader for the iPhone and it is a web application.
There are valid cases for using a native iPhone application, when you need access to native iPhone functionality, but let's not jump on the band-wagon and build iPhone apps just because we can and because it's cool.
This is precisely the reason (now we get to the interesting bit), our new iPhone interface to fixx will be entirely web-based, delivered from your fixx installation.
While we are working on this iPhone interface for fixx, we would love your ideas on what you would like to see in this interface in the long term.
I am pleased to announce that fixx, our bug tracking system, has been finally released to the general public.
In keeping with our ideology of simple licensing structures, we have 2 different paid-for licenses available; a Commercial license that allows unlimited users and unlimited projects per instance of fixx, at $799, and an Academic license that is just a Commercial license for academic organisations, at $399.
As stated before, fixx is free to download and use for a single user, under the default Single User license. Try it out.
I would also like to thank everyone who participated in the beta program and provided their valuable feedback to help shape the first release of fixx.
We have more exciting updates to come, and an excellent road-map, so make sure you keep an eye on our blog.
As we rapidly approach the release of fixx, our bug tracking solution (I have heard hushed voices in the Labplex that this might be as soon as Monday), I wanted to take the opportunity to announce the development of our next product.
solomon is a web-based contact manager and simplified CRM solution for small and medium businesses, who want to break free of Neolithic desktop solutions that don't play well with information sharing. It will be a web application you can run on your own hardware, like fixx.
solomon is still brewing at this stage but you are welcome to take a peek and sign-up to be notified when the beta goes out.
Before someone starts the "clone wars", solomon is indeed inspired by Highrise from 37Signals. However, we plan to bring our own unique take to interaction, functionality and purpose to the small business CRM space and fill a gap many existing, over-priced and non-user friendly enterprise web/desktop products have left.
Lately I have been focusing on the marketing and sales strategy for the lab, especially with the impending release of fixx, our bug tracking product for software teams. When I joined the lab I mentioned in my first post, that I was spear-heading the social computing and networking efforts and recently, this has expanded to a more marketing and sales focused role. As you're all aware we already have profiles on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc, but we get to communicate with our followers, we don't get to interact with them.
This is why I attended the FUEL conference held by Carsonified in London last Friday, to listen to key speakers talk about how businesses interact with their audience using the latest web tools.
There were some great presentations and I must admit that at the start of the day I was wary that my ridiculously early alarm clock call and 3 hour train journey would leave me somewhat exhausted and not very attentive. However, to my surprise, I had no reason to be concerned because I was fully engaged with each presentation throughout the day.
The key message of the conference was to discuss the different ways which you can interact with your audience and I think that they demonstrated this very well by keeping all of the conference audience engaged throughout the day.
Some of the highlighted speakers of FUEL included:
Carsonified's co-founder Ryan Carson discussed how you can interact with customers
Tara Hunt explained whuffie and how it works to build a community around your brand
Virgin's Alex Hunter discussed how customers played a big role in Virgin America...
Ted Hunt from Innocent discussing branding and interacting with customers
and dont hassle the hoff with soocial (Stefan Fountain and Daniel Spronk)
This does not include other great presentations by Keir Whitaker (Carsonified), Nic Halstead (Fav.or.it), Stewart Townsend (Sun), Clive Howard (Howard/Baines), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Paul Boag (Headscape), who discussed some interesting concepts on working with clients, Steve Pearce (Poke), who had a very cool presentation with excellent drawings about how to get the best out of your business as well as a very informative presentation about branding from Richard Moross (Moo).
The overall message which I received from the conference, is that it is essential for any business to interact with their audience using the best tools which the web can offer. Some of the tools which were demonstrated were Seesmic (an online video questions and answers site, useful for interaction between a business and its customers), UserVoice (collecting user votes, ratings on products, etc) and there are many others.
All of these tools were discussed because they can play such a key part in the success of a business' future. Many of the presentations showed how being proactive, creative and interacting with their customers or followers has proved to be very successful for their business. This is something we will be considering in great detail at the lab so watch this space...
Okay this is a bit delayed but its been in the pipeline for a while.
I recently attended the first ever BarCampNorthEast, held at the Art Work Galleries in Newcastle.
Now if you dont know what BarCamp is, it's described as ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. Basically at BarCamp you can:
give a presentation on anything you like
attend the many presentations held by others
have an all together jolly time meeting talented/cool kids
Personally, i love BarCamp because of its informal participatory nature, for example, Tara Hunt's discussion on mind hacks found everybody in a circle 'splaining their own personal hacks; Bon's hack involved setting his clock fifteen minutes fast which allowed him a combination of getting from A to B early or on time. Good hack!
The night time saw a rather tasty barbecue, mojito's (made by yours truely!) and an on-the-fly DJ set by none other than Ian Forrester using his amazing Pacemaker.
So yeah, BarCampNorthEast rocked! Roll on BarCampNorthEast2!
In my last post, I talked about the ethics and principles behind the creation of hedgehog lab. Interestingly, a year after they were formulated, the principles still stand and continue to be applied in our day-to-day operations.
I wanted to discuss the other side of the coin, which are usually "company policies" (or rules or regulations or call them whatever).
It is a given that to operate under the legal structure of a "company", there is some need of guidance and a framework of understanding between people in the company. I suspect this was the reason company policies and rules were conceived. Otherwise, let's face it; you are running a loosely held-together anarchy.
The problem with this, is that, after years of employment law and employer-employee tensions, company policies have grown to a stage where they are either impractical, irrelevant, or sometimes, plain stupid.
We can all identify working in companies where we constantly question the basis of rules and regulations. It is a pity, that it is hard to find an employee these days who does not disagree with some policy that is established by their employer.
At hedgehog lab, we do have policies. However, these policies are not set in isolation by any one person. They are a collective decision taken by the entire team (with one of us co-founders making the final vote, if collective agreement cannot be reached). Moreover, we ensure that these policies are reviewed collectively by everyone and every team member has an indisputable right to question every policy we make.
Policies that worked for us and continue doing so.
Working from home
I discussed our working from home policy in detail in previous posts. This has been an overall success for us, in the fact that we have seen no significant problems with productivity compared to companies where you are forced to "go to work".
The difference here is that, unlike some companies, we are not a remote team (and never will be). Our team enjoy human contact and the collaborative benefits of working together far too much to re-sign ourselves to working from our couch.
Developers are both the front-line and back-office staff
This one splits popular opinion, but we are strong believers that the best way to deliver both exceptional products and service, is to involve developers at both the front-line and back-office operations.
The risk here is that most developers are either not very interested in dealing with customers, or do not have the right skills to pull off customer service and sometimes, sales. Our approach to this has been liberal, where we have left the choice to the person as to whether they want to be involved or not. Luckily for us, everyone in our team has been quite enthusiastic about this.
I believe that with the right amount of support and motivation, you can turn the opinion of the most stubborn developer to get involved in customer-facing operations.
Training
The problem with running a software company that builds products, is that you tend to not have time for doing much else. With milestones to hit, features to plan and bugs to fix, there is very little time and justification for training. It is far worse if you are a service-based company.
We have made it a policy now to encourage training actively, as opposed to leaving developers to "learn in their own time". Using your "lunch break" and "spare time", for training is so 1890s! Our training policy revolves around fully-paid conference attendances, free books and our own lab days, which encourage active discussion and learning of new concepts and technologies.
Policies that didn't work so well (even we get it wrong sometimes!)
Official job titles
When we started hedgehog lab, we wasted something in the magnitude of a whole man-week, trying to come up with the structure of the company. This was when we had 2 people in the company! We deliberated (no really!) a lot on what roles we would have and what titles we would use for future hires.
This week long analysis produced gems like "Director, Technology & Products" and "Developer, Technology & Products" (I'll buy you a chocolate brownie if you have a clue what those roles mean). Suffice to say, we went down a lot of points on the cool-factor with our newest hire, Rey.
Last week, we abolished these job titles and gave the opportunity for everyone to define their own job title, that fits in with what they feel represents their role and job description. Look out for the Code Ninjas!
Business cards
As part of our week-long "formation strategy" (eat that Sun Tzu!), another stupid-genius idea we came up with (to be honest, I have to take the sole responsibility for this), was to have business cards for every employee and make sure they use them when they meet new people. Needless to say, not many of us (the single ones) were getting any dates as a direct result of this!
Ok, maybe it wasn't that bad, but don't even get me started on how stupid and total waste of time this idea was. This policy was quickly abolished, with the business cards being limited to me, for my sins of coming up with the idea (and because I am the Managing Director, I guess)!
We would love to hear about any policies that you have come across, at your present or previous employer, that you either dis-agreed with or were plain stupid/funny.
In the next post in this series, Mark Forster (co-founder of hedgehog lab), will be talking about his personal experience as a developer starting a software company and reflect on the year that was.
A year ago, on 21 May 2007, Mark Forster and I co-founded hedgehog lab. After years of frustration working in full-time jobs that never seemed to fulfil our expectations, we decided that there was a great opportunity to build a developer-friendly company in the North East of England.
In retrospect, it was both the toughest and most fulfilling decision we ever made. Toughest because both of us hardly fit into the popular profile of software start-up founders of our time. When we started hedgehog lab, both of us were well past 25 and had considerable financial risk. Yet, nothing was more clearer in our minds than the single minded determination to create a company that lived up both to it's values and delivered the financial results to be sustainable.
In this series of posts on our anniversary, I wanted to talk about some of the key issues that affected both the founding of hedgehog lab and the journey through the past year. This one covers founding principles.
In an age when most start-ups are founded with the single-minded goal of "making lots of money", often at the expense of both employees and customers, we had a very value and principle focused approach to how we wanted to run hedgehog lab.
In no particular order, the following were the founding principles of hedgehog lab,
Treat your employees right. In turn, they will treat your customers better.
This is so obvious and simple, that it amazes me to see so many companies not follow it. It is blindingly obvious to me that if you want great customer service (in the all-encompassing meaning of the term), you have to start by treating your employees right.
Why is it that "employee loyalty" is much taunted in HR circles, but "employer loyalty" is a rarely used word? An employer-employee relationship is a 2-way relationship, much like a customer-supplier relationship. Yet, companies pay far less attention and effort to maintaining the latter. Given the current supply and demand in the software market, it is high time employers started listening to their people. I understand the irony in my criticism, as I am an employer and an employee. My point still stands!
Have conversations with your customers.
Most companies have only 2 types of interactions with their customers, sales and support. There is nothing wrong with that, but to be a genuinely customer-focused company, you need to engage with them everyday. Listening to your customers is not enough. Talking to your customers is not enough.
We try to reach out to our customers in everything we do. Whether it be a new company policy, the re-design of our website, or ideas for a new product, we engage with customers to gain their feedback and if necessary, make the changes that aligns us better with their needs.
Turn your customers into fans.
Having customers is not enough for us. We want to turn them into fans by appealing to not just their needs but their perceptions of what a great company should be like.
You might think that this is a bit lofty for a company that produces business software. After all, only consumer companies with cool products can turn customers into raving fans. You might just be wrong.
Eat your own dog food
This is mostly used as a promotional strategy by product companies to prove that their product is "good enough". However, at hedgehog lab, this is our primary strategy when developing a new product and is the overarching principle around both product and feature design. We would never develop anything that we would not use as a company or endorse otherwise.
It has been a while in the making, but I am glad to announce the beta release of fixx to the general public.
To the dismay of many of our followers, we have been rather tight-lipped about fixx until now. No doubt, I will be following up with a more detailed post on how fixx came to be, our product development process, the decisions made and lessons learned. For now, we have a sneak peek at the initial features in fixx version 1.0 and a public beta for those who prefer getting their hands dirty.
We are still looking for more beta testers and general feedback or comments are welcome in our people-powered customer forums.
As strongsupporters of open standards and grass-roots community efforts on the web, we at hedgehog lab have always taken pride in helping further the adoption of both.
However, there has always been a feeling lurking at the back of our minds that a lot of this felt like lip-service and that we could do more to lead by example.
Therefore, I am pleased to announce that after a month of development, fixx supports a key set of open standards. This was a tough decision on our end, as it meant that we had to delay the launch of fixx by more time than we intended to.
Open ID
In our experience, Open ID uptake in the enterprise has been slow. The primary reason for this is potentially that many internal users are locked into either a Single Sign-on (SSO) or LDAP solution, as enterprise administrators generally tend to distrust authentication schemes that they have no control over. This is OK if your issue tracker is a closed, private system.
However, when your issue tracker is open to your customers (which it should), or you are an open source project that would like to encourage people to contribute, supporting Open ID ensures that they can authenticate painlessly without having to remember another set of authentication details.
Microformats
fixx currently supports hCard to represent user and profile information. fixx also supports various elemental microformats for content.
We still have a long way in making fixx completely microformats-enabled as we look at incorporating XFN, hCalendar, and xFolk in the future and looking at how we could use some of the more obscure microformats in a web application scenario.
Data Portability
Data-centric (views that return system data) in fixx support retrieving the view in either XHTML, JSON, or XML format, enabling you to write your own widgets and front-end to retrieving data in fixx.
There is also the ability to export your issues into CSV, Excel or PDF formats to do what you want with it.
In spite of all the standards support for fixx, there are still places where it can do with improvements (and we are working on this in future releases).
REST API
Although fixx currently has a REST interface to add, manage and view your data (in JSON, XML, XHTML), the implementation is incomplete and undocumented. We hope to have a finished implementation and complete documentation for the second release of fixx.
Note to hackers: There is still a lot of REST functionality for you to tinker around with (we know you want to!)
RSS
RSS feeds for key views are planned for the next version of fixx. Given that fixx supports notifications through e-mail and Twitter at this moment, RSS is a lower priority in our feature list.
XMPP
Continuing with the theme of notifications, fixx will support XMPP and various other messaging protocols for notifications sent directly to the desktop.
Finally, apologies for the delay in release to everyone who has signed up to be notified, but we are confident that the work we are putting in will be worth the delay.
Like others beforeme, I thought I'd take this opportunity to introduce myself to our blog readers as I am new to the 'Lab (employee #5!).
I'm Reyhan and I'm a web developer who primarily concerns himself with front-end wizardry and occasional Django meddling.
I use OS X for the majority though i'm not adverse to playing with Linux or indeed, any other logical operating system. I'm a big fan of all things open source, web standards and Subway.
My current role at the 'Lab is working as a front-end developer on a pretty fantabulous bug tracker called fixx. Have you heard of it? If you catch up with Simon or I at @media 2008, we have some stickers and other fixx related goodies that we shall be giving away. So make sure you say hello.
Joining hedgehog lab appealed to me in many different ways (really) but what I'm particularly enjoying is the steep learning curve of working in a startup. It's inspiring to work with others who are as passionate about the internets and software, as I am.
I'm a fan of lists so here are some things I find a bit amazing:
I am sure you will be hearing more from me on the latest fixx goings-on and general ramblings about microformats, open standards and happenings at the 'Lab.
As a company that wants to build the best environment possible for developers to flourish in, we have always encouraged freedom of choice in the tools and technologies they use. Our team currently uses a mix of Ubuntu (Simon), Mac OS X (myself), Windows XP (Mark) and Windows Vista (Ashley) as operating systems. We use these because they are the tools that allow the highest level of productivity for us as individuals (although how anyone can be productive on Vista, I am not sure).
Although the mix of systems causes a bit of trouble when it comes to system administration, the pros outweigh the cons and the productivity boost justifies the little extra time we spend in sys admin time. After all, the aim is to make the developers’ life easier!
Likewise, we all have different views when it comes to programming languages of choice with Python, Java and PHP all holding a special place in our hearts. Given that we have experience in using everything from C to Ruby to C#, this usually works to our advantage on the consulting side of our business, being able to provide any development service that clients require.
However, I was reading an interesting post last week on how standardising programming language choices has helped Google innovate with technology and it got me thinking on the advantages of limiting the choice of programming languages, especially for internal use in product development.
At hedgehog lab, we use 4 primary languages for both product and internal development.
Java
Java has always been our language of choice for product development despite many wise people frowning upon it. No other language polarises people so much as Java these days and no matter whatever the arguments, Java is still big in the enterprise and finding qualified people is relatively easier in today’s ultra competitive developer recruitment market.
And the very fact that makes Java undesirable for many (it is not powerful enough or cool enough), makes it reliable for us to work with and the JVM and open source efforts behind Java make it an obvious choice.. Anyway, I am not here to start another debate on Java vs Others; that we use Java to build our products is a simple fact.
PHP
PHP is by far the most popular web development language that we have come across (every small business we speak to wants to use PHP) and like Java, it is easy to learn and recruit for. The evolution of some good frameworks has allowed us to develop some rapid internal applications and experiment with ideas.
Python
Python is our favourite language by far. It is so simple yet powerful and has an impressive cross platform record. With Django, there is now a compelling case for the use of Python to replace PHP (if not for the fact that every one of us knows PHP so well). Our new web site will be built on a custom CMS derived from the Django framework.
Javascript
Perhaps the most misunderstood programming language ever (I remember having many frustrating arguments with developers who insist it is a scripting language), is used in almost all of our UI code (fancy AJAX anyone?) and will even be making its debut in the back-end in one of our new R&D projects.
Given that the set of these 4 languages allow us to do everything from write parallel systems to sockets based servers to desktop systems, we have now decided to limit our set of programming languages to these. It allows us to build greater expertise in these 4 languages while enabling us to contribute back to these communities without spreading ourselves too thin. Given that Python can do pretty much everything PHP can do, we might even decide to reduce the list to 3.
Does this mean individual developers will be restricted from learning new languages? Absolutely not! Developers at hedgehog lab are always encouraged to learn new tools and technologies and we will constantly re-assess the programming languages to see what fits our purpose at any given moment of time. The same applies for client projects where we will still be working on a delicious cocktail of C#, Ruby and other technologies to fit into a client’s environment.
I will be posting again in 6 months to evaluate how things have progressed with our restricted programming language choice and lessons (if any) we learn.
“SIMON! Introduce yourself!”
No way!
“Introduce yourself…”
Ok! …I’m Si! …the new guy! …be nice to me cos I’m shy!
Erm, yeah..anyway. “People” have been nudging me to get on the ol’ blogaroonie to say “Hi”, but apparently, that modern masterpiece above wasn’t enough / could be considered slightly creepy.
As you may have gathered, I’m Simon… or Si… or the douchemeister general, and I too am a new hedgehog lab employee. My official title is, “Director, Research & Development”, but that’s only cos “Code Playboy” was taken. By Sarat. It essentially means that I get to dabble with different technologies and tell people about them. Just to give some context of what I mean by “different technologies”: I’m a huge fan of Python and the Django framework, I think that XMPP has a lot of potential with regards to APIs, and I believe that data portability is going to be huge.
A couple more important (and somewhat religious) tidbits: I’m a Linux guy myself (they’ve already got me setting up Ubuntu servers up here), and my editor of choice is VIM (not double jointed enough for that OTHER one).
I have joined from a larger company, where I worked as a front-end developer of sorts for about 18 months. Being at hedgehog lab is a completely different ball game: in a smaller company you contribute to pretty much every area, whether that’s saying “good idea, let’s go with it!”, suggesting an alternative, setting up a Ubuntu server, configuring software, fixing a bug, or playing with some wireframes, I have done it. All in the space of a month.
That has its good points and its bad (primarily that there’s always work to be done!), but it gives me the impression of having more input, and the lack of any major approval hierarchy (beyond, “Sarat am I ok to try this…?”) sees a very quick turnaround in getting stuff from idea stage to reality.
Needless to say, it’s great at the lab. I hope to bring you a new entry (hopefully with more substance) in the near future.
As a new member of hedgehog lab (and what is fast becoming a custom here), I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and my role here at the lab!
My name is Ashley Green and I started working here about 3 weeks ago. My role within the team is Developer, Technology and Products (I love my title)!
I am a recent BSc (hons) Computing Studies graduate from Northumbria University in Newcastle which I graduated from in July last year. I then went on to briefly work for a digital agency and it was after I worked there when I discovered hedgehog lab and over the past few months I have heard so many good things about the company and read some really good recommendations that I knew they were building something which I really wanted to be a part of and so far I am really enjoying working here. I am not sure how many people can actually turn around and say that they enjoy their job, but I love what I do and the atmosphere within the lab is really encouraging.
So what do I do; well, in the short amount of time which I have been here I have had plenty of training provided by my fellow team members to help me get upto speed learning cool new technologies like Struts 2, Hibernate and Spring.
I have already been given responsibility to work on an exciting new project called Solomon, which is a knowledge base for collaborative teams and customer support (hint: Solomon was a wise king). The project is currently in the inception phase and we will be bringing updates to you as soon as possible.
I will also be responsible for spearheading the social computing and networking strategy for the lab, so if you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter etc then please look us up. I am busy working on new strategies to ensure that you can always find us and engage with us no matter where you are, so I will keep you updated!
It is refreshing to use my creativity and being able to voice my idea’s and opinion’s to the team, which are always considered, regardless of how rubbish or ingenius they might be. The main thing for me is that I am valued as a team member and I have the support of my fellow team members. I get to work alongside people who know what they’re doing and are passionate about their work, which is really what any company in this industry should be about.
Well thats about it for now, this blog was really just a bit of background information about me and my role so if you want to know anything about me then please leave a comment or contact me by email and I will answer all of your questions, but don’t forget to keep checking our blogs and website.
Hi, my name is Jonny and I'm the most recent person to join the team at the lab. My background is in games software, but I decided to delve into enterprise software development as I felt the area could learn a thing or two from the world of games from an aesthetic and performance standpoint. When writing games software it is not just important to focus on functional requirements but also the overall experience.
Imagine hitting the fire button on a shooting game, and suddenly a message appears with a big exclamation mark saying, "Error 127888876AB2 - Please contact your system admin", this certainly wouldn't be acceptable to a gamer paying £40+ for a game, so why should it be acceptable in enterprise software where the cost is often much higher?
Many would say that the bugs in the latest release of any enterprise product can just be patched with version 2.0.3.7.1.2.735 and everything will be fine, but you never had to buy a game for your PS2, and subsequently had to patch it with a mass torrent of updates and bug-fixes. This is because the developers knew that if they didn't get it right the first time, then they were screwed, and in a sense the constraint of being unable to patch the software forced the developers to ensure the code was stable, and quality design practices were followed wherever possible.
Getting this level of quality design and bug-free code written for enterprise software isn't as difficult or time consuming as some may imagine if you have developers with the right mind-set. The important thing to realise is that, just because we can release a mass of bug fix patches doesn't mean that this should be used as an excuse to release poor quality software.
Since starting here a few months ago I've been focussing my efforts on mobile software development as the mobile space is fast becoming a very exciting place to be, as it matures into a place for serious developers and equally serious software. My first port of call was iPhone development as it is a nice, clean and aesthetically pleasing platform to develop for, that is currently in vogue within the mobile marketplace. So what better way to improve the user experience our products provide, and bring their powerful functionality to the place a large number of customers will find it most useful.
For our soon to be released product solomon, I have been working hard to produce an iPhone app that makes use of all the features the main CRM provides, but with simplistic design and a good user experience in mind. This will make the app very easy for iPhone users to get to grips with, and will provide a simple yet powerful way to keep in touch with and manage your business contacts whenever-wherever. Here is a sneaky peak into the app, and some of the features it will provide.
Over the coming months I will be developing fixx and solomon apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Android. Developing for this range will provide the majority of our customers with the ability to take full advantage of our products at the times when they are unable to get to a computer. Keep checking back for updates on how development is going, and previews of what is happening with our mobile products.
One of our original aims of opening up a RESTful API for our bug tracking product fixx, was to encourage a healthy eco-system of third-party developers who can enhance and add to the functionality fixx brings and provide open integration points to third-party apps.
It has been great to see the overwhelming response from third-party developers who have spent their time and effort to enhance the fixx eco-system and we thought it would be the perfect time to thank everyone who has been working with the fixx API, providing feedback/criticism (which we always listen to and take on board), and generally writing some awesome add-ons. The following are just a few of them that we hope will be useful for those currently using fixx or considering using fixx in the future.
IDE Integration for Visual Studio and Eclipse
One of our customers, Martijn Laarman, has done a stellar job delivering a first version of Visual Studio Add-On for fixx. The project is pre-beta and is looking for people to try out the system and help him iron out bugs. There is also a project underway to bring IDE goodness to fixx in Eclipse.
Instant screenshots with Freshlog
Freshlog is a pretty nifty screen capture tool for the Mac that I personally use. It integrates with fixx and many other bug tracking tools, allowing you to capture and submit screenshots as new issues or comments to existing issues. It comes at an affordable price of $14.95 which is a bargain considering the plethora of tools and speed of updates it provides.
Source Control and more with XP-Dev.com
XP-Dev.com offers Enterprise Subversion hosting and has leveraged Subversion post-commit hooks to update fixx issues with commit messages. Even if you host your own Subversion repo, you can use a Ruby post-commit hook that allows you to do the same. Mercurial and Git hooks are also available.
These are just a few of the Add-Ons and integrations that third party developers and some of our customers have been working on. You can always find a more comprehensive list on our Add-Ons for fixx page and we would love to hear from you if you have been working on an add-on and would like it to be featured.
We've been working hard at the lab on this for the past four months, so I'm extremely proud and excited to announce the launch of our latest product, solomon. solomon is a Small Business CRM and web-based contact management app designed with small businesses and freelancers in mind.
We were hoping to launch solomon in late 2009 and I know a lot of people have been waiting impatiently. We had to hold its release back for a few months to ensure the user experience was just right.
So what's in this version of solomon?
We've really focused our efforts on making solomon ultra-fast and productive. By taking full advantage of today's browser technologies, we've made sure that solomon keeps you productive by focusing on performance, ease of use and collaboration.
Our focus in version 1.0 was productivity and response time in these four main areas:
Search
We've made search super fast, so you can find your contacts quickly and effortlessly. As well as allowing you to search for your contacts by name, solomon will also allow you to search with more complex search patterns much like a lot of today's web based search engines.
Contact Management
Our main focus in this initial release has been about allowing you to manage your contacts in solomon with as little effort as possible. solomon allows you to import your contacts from industry standard Outlook CSV files and exports to both vCard and Outlook CSV. The goal here was to provide a unified address book that you can use from anywhere.
Tasks and Notes
When working with a contact in solomon, you can immediately get an overview of all of the information for that contact as well as the tasks and notes associated with them. Adding notes and tasks is a snap using a single screen interface that behaves more like a desktop application than a web app.
Mobility
We love our smart phones, and one of our goals from the outset was to make solomon truly mobile. Building on top of the solomon API, we've built an iPhone application which will allow you to take your contacts with you anywhere. The iPhone app is currently in review by Apple and should be on the App Store within days. Our native iPhone application allows you to take advantage of many of the features of the phone like calling your contact directly, sending them an email or finding their location on Google Maps. With the iPhone app, you can also keep track of the tasks you have and add notes while your'e on the move.
Where is solomon going?
We've been using solomon internally for about 2 months now and we are really happy with the experience but thats not to say we haven't got bigger plans. Far from it! Our roadmap is bursting at the seams with features we think are really going to improve solomon and we really think your'e going to like them too.
We aren't going to commit to any one feature or specific milestones at the moment until we've given our customers a chance to have their say about what they would like to see in the next version of solomon but to give you a taste of what's to come, here's a few of the features we're really excited about getting out in a coming iterations of solomon:
Track Cases, Leads and Deals We will be introducing more Sales Force Automation (SFA) functionality in 1.1 and 1.2, which will enable you to track leads and deals you make, keep on top of relationships using cases, and track new business.
Mobile apps We are working on concepts for native apps for BlackBerry and Android versions of our mobile app. We are absolutely committed to supporting multiple mobile platforms and these apps are high on our list.
Outlook Plug-in We know that a vast majority of small businesses use Outlook as their preferred e-mail client and we have a very exciting Outlook plug-in planned that will allow you to tie your e-mail and solomon data together.
E-mail Integration We will be working on advanced e-mail integration, allowing you to write and forward e-mails directly into solomon.
3rd Party Integration A wider integration of your contact data with other web and desktop applications like Google Contacts and real time 2-way sync capabilities. Whether you want to view contact information in Gmail or access your tasks in Google Calendar, our planned OpenSocial integration will support this. We will also be supporting import and export from 3rd party systems and popular file formats.
We're excited to announce public availability of the Hosted version of our bug tracking product, fixx. This has been the single biggest request we have consistently received over the past year, so we have heard you and acted on it!
Hosted fixx is a great and flexible way to get started with your own instance of fixx without having to set-up your own server and configure it. Despite how painless and easy it is to run your own instance of fixx, we know that many organisations love the ease of having someone else manage their software using a software as a service (SaaS) model. It is also a great way for organisations without IT staff to get started with fixx.
Unlike traditional on-demand/SaaS models, we have gone all out to give you the power of having your own dedicated hosted version of fixx that you have absolute control over. This means, you control when your software is upgraded and which features you want to turn on. We handle all the boring work like configuration, back-ups and upgrades.
fixx Hosted comes with absolutely no restrictions on functionality. You get every feature of the installable version, including unlimited users, projects and issues. Which other hosted bug tracker or project management tool offers that? The only thing that is limited is disk size for attachments but even that is generous with 20GB+ space, which is limitless for most common usage.
This is only the beginning for Hosted services from hedgehog lab. We hear you loud and clear on a hosted solomon and we are working hard on it. For now, we want to start slow and get feedback from our community on how we can improve our hosted offerings. Keep an eye out on our blog as we make constant improvements while delivering advanced functionality in our product roadmap.
Its been about a month now since we released version 1.0 of solomon our small business CRM & contact management software and we've been working harder than ever to get some of the features in that you asked for and we promised.
From 1.1 onwards we are giving you the ability to track your deals. With deals, you and your team can effortlessly track those lucrative deals you've been pitching for. As always we've focused on productivity keeping the user interface tightly focused on your contacts, how you work with them and the information you track against them.
With deals comes better integration with your notes and tasks. Tasks can be created, associated and tracked right there within your deals. Notes too.. ..In fact you can now associate any number of contacts, companies and users with a deal and coordinate your efforts to securing that big contract.
We've also added webCal support Thats right! Now all of your tasks seamlessly integrate with your calendar via the webCal format.
Finally we've had our resident design guru making some awesome design tweaks here and there to generally make the user interface look and feel that little bit slicker and for you techies, we've had our technical boffins, improving on the underlying REST API meaning you have more control over how you get to and work with your solomon data.
We've still got a few more features that we're aching to get in before we make the 1.1 release official but rest assured we'll be working even harder for another week or so to get this update out to you. In the meantime why not tell us what you think about what we're working on or tell us what you'd like to see in up and coming versions of solomon?
We know that not everyone loves going through a lot of text or pages of information to find out more details about a company. To help solve this, we have been working hard on trying to introduce short, snappy videos to our site to give people a concise and more "interactive" glimpse into what we are about.
We are really happy with the first version of the video and I wanted to share this with the world. We would love hear your criticisms, feedback, suggestions or praise. The video was produced by the excellent folk at YourFilm and I would definitely recommend them if you were looking for someone to produce any interactive or corporate videos.
