Tech Notes From The Trenches

I expect programmers to be perfectionists but also pragmatic. I expect them to love Chess, Go or any other strategic game. I expect them to be nerds. I expect them to love to build cool things.

I expect project managers to be well versed in software engineering, project management and motivation. I expect them to have some technical knowledge. I expect them to be people persons.

I expect technical team leaders to be programmers with strong communication skills. I expect them to coach other programmers and encourage them to write great code. I expect team leaders to always look for the best answer to hard questions.

I expect my team members to be respectful of other team members’ time. I expect anyone in the team to interrupt me, only when they really need my help. (Because interruptions kill productivity)

That’s what I expect from my team to build great software.

It has been quite an exciting year in New York for me and Aycron. There were highs and lows. The lows were mostly around the beginning of 2009. The highs, around the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010.

The economical crisis in 2009 did affect us, but not as much as you would have expected. The lows were mostly because I had just moved to New York and it took me a few months to get started on Aycron’s business development.

The fact is that Aycron had one client in New York when I first arrived. Now we have four clients in New York. In February, we might have six clients. I am happy about that. It took a lot of hard work from everyone at Aycron, but the future is bright for 2010.

The number of clients is not that important. What’s important is that our clients are happy with our work. They are happy to recommend us to prospective clients and honestly talk about their experience with Aycron.

It is hard work to keep our clients happy, but we go the extra mile. And it feels good to hear what they have to say about our efforts. I think we need to get even better at keeping our clients happy and that’s why we are hiring! (in Buenos Aires)

In 2009 we became partners of Engine Yard, worldwide leader in Ruby on Rails applications hosting and big supporter of the RoR community.

In 2010 we became partners of Fluid Intent, which will help Aycron’s business development in New York in the future.

We plan to continue rocking it for our clients. We want to keep them happy, as they are our best source of projects. We plan to build and release a few products/services this year, something that we started on 2009.

We plan to increase our development team as much as possible. But this will be a gradual process that will let us assure the quality of our work. All of this is possible thanks to our new clients in New York and the great engineers at Aycron.

Did you ever search for anything in Twitter? What did you get? Probably a lot of noise. Useful information is hard to find using Twitter search. Hopsy solves this.

Do a Hopsy search and find useful Twitter messages. How? Hopsy ranks the Twitter search results using an influence number. People on Twitter are influential according to the messages and links they tweet. Your followers endorse you (RT) or don’t. The links you share start trending or don’t. That is influence.

Basically, if you have a good reputation, your tweets will show up before than someone with no rep or a bad rep. Makes sense? If yes, please check out Hopsy. If not, I would like to hear your ideas about Twitter tweet rankings and search.

Here is a Hopsy search you can try out: Search for 2009. Here is a Twitter search to compare: Search for 2009.