Software Reality Day by Day

We are "confirmed"! :)

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:08:00 +0000

Yahoo! OBS Labs got official "confirmed" status from Engine Yard's Rails Development directory:
http://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/obs-labs

We need your feedback!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:17:00 +0000

If you've get in touch with me or my company OBS Labs for Rails consulting and development please leave us feedback here:
http://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/obs-labs/recommendations/new

Thanks! We need your voice!

Entrepreneurs can change the world join the momenent.

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:32:00 +0000

Just wanted to share an idea of our new clients. I really liked their inspirational video:

http://grasshopper.com/idea/

8 Facts about the Russian Startup Scene

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:24:00 +0000

Together with my friend Bjoern Herrmann we compiled this short article about Russian Startup Scene

8 Facts about the Russian Startup Scene

Did you ever wonder about the startup scene in St. Petersburg and Moscow? I spent this summer in St.Petersburg and Moscow and did some deep research. Earlier I was quite unaware - therefore I was pleasantly surprised and excited to find out how vibrant and ambitious the scene really is! Watch out for the Russians ;-)!!

Here are 8 points you should know.

Read full article on Startup School Blog

Supercool startup recommends OBS Labs!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:35:00 +0000

We are now working in close partnership with SuperCoolSchool (http://beta.supercoolschool.com) - very promising San Francisco-based startup in online education.
They just posted recommendation for us on their blog - check this out:
http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/resommendation-for-a-supercool-ror-team-in-russia-.html

Our internal project!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:33:00 +0000

Finally this happened !
After we created over 20 projects for our clients in US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia...
OBS Labs works on our own startup ! Two of our top Rails developers work on building alpha version (proof of concept) project.

I cant tell really much about it as its still in stealth mode. I spend quite some time for discussing this idea with developers, managers from US and Europe. Sounds like this can be something great but i still prefer to keep fingers crossed.
Its going to be done for Europe and Asian markets and has successful prototypes on US market (yeah US already invented everything, all you can do is adopt it locally). It is all about socializing and surviving in crisis times. I really cant tell anything more at the moment but i am very excited about this idea!
The next big thing is coming!

New US phone: +1 (415) 8303 771

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:22:00 +0000

We changed our US phone number to +1 (415) 8 303 77 1

Wheather you are looking for new affordable software development partner, consultant on Ruby on Rails or just want to discuss your idea about next web project -feel free to call us! Normally i answer myself or one of our developers can take a message.

We dont have office manager here - yeah we all have to learn IKEA lessons especially in crisis times :)

New Rails projects!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:09:00 +0000

Many important things happened here in OBS Labs since my last post. We visited European Rails conference in Berlin, Germany. We completed Social Network site for web startup in Switzerland (hope its going to be another exciting site about wine). We participated in softlaunch of Quevita (http://www.quevita.com/) potentially largest European social network around healthy living style.

Now i am in conversation with Supercool School (supercoolschool.com). This can be non-profit project where i and some of our developers could use our Rails coding skills to bring Change in Africa and countries with weak education system. This is going to be top cool project and i cant wait to join this Supercool team.

Launch application in 6 weeks - myth or reality?

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:05:00 +0000

Some great Rails development companies guarantee that they can launch the first version of your desired app in just as fast as 6 weeks!

WoW! That sounds great- we can get desirable result in about 1.5 month - this is the way one can think of it...

Is it real?
Yes it is. There is no magic here and you don't have to be David Blane to do it. Here is where the trick is. Most companies (including OBS Labs) use Rails in pair with Agile development(SCRUM, eXtreme Programming or whatever). In this approach development divide into series of 2 week iterations. As a result of each iteration clients receive fully-workable and tested code, that includes few (5-10) features for that iteration. After reviewing iteration result features for the next iter. are discussed together with client.
So typically in 6 weeks you can have 3 iteration and from 15-30 featured fully workable application. Isn't it enough for average 1.0 version, prototype or whatever? Well, it definitely should be enough to make client to sign long term contract ;-)
How can OBS Labs beat it?
Well, at first we are not trying to compete with anyone. We are small, experienced at what we are doing for years, do it good and our clients love us for that dedicated approach.
We use same latest Rails technologies, contribute to new open source trendy stuff as well, use same practices for project management, trying to keep quality as our idol.
And when you can buy two similar products you should consider price as a important factor.

Personally i love American cars. I am currently driving 2005 Chevy Tahoe and i am so happy with it. In Europe its quite expensive to have American full size, but i still love it. Those who know a little about this car know that its build on same platform as other GM models like Chevy Silverado, Chevy Suburban, Caddy Escalade and Hummer H2. I dont need to carry bike or logs so i don't need Silverado, i am not Texas farmer with 5 kids so i dont need Suburban, i dont like rap so no need for Caddy, and offroad is not for me so H2 wasn't my choice. For me my Tahoe is just the smart choice between this models. I simply dont want to pay extra $$$ for chrome on wheels and handles while I enjoy full size car, i never had problems with taking additional passenger or bag with me and i am not scared with hard road conditions. The right choice for me.

OBS value for similar project would be as much as about 3 times less than other companies can offer. They will charge you about $120-$150/hour saying that they are the only and the best experts on that market. We normally charge about $50/hour, while paying our developers about the same rate as they do! (Today rates of developers in Russia rising to EU and US ranges, and its not a good way to save just on salaries) How can we handle it? The answer is simple both they and we are using offshore developers , but our developers are all in on office in Russia, we cant afford to invest as much in marketing and advertising, being Formula1 team sponsor pay top $$$ to managers and shareholders(OBS Labs is hold by developers themselves). When you work with OBS Labs the structure of your costs is simple, clear and top efficient!

Sounds good, can you show me some examples?
You are always welcome. We just recently completed and launched social networking application in one man/month, we created ecommerce and mailing application in 2 weeks! Some time ago we did simple CMS system in about 4 weeks? Want some more? I can refer to both clients who work with us for years and clients competed their first goals for less than 6 weeks. Please contact me directly by vlad _at) obsgroup.biz for more information and consultancy on your project.

Some Rails code tips

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:54:00 +0000

Recently we did internal code review for one of our clients.
After results been send we were asked whats wrong with code we pointed out:

v = params[:vintage].to_i if v < 100
if v < (Date.today.year - 2000)
v = 2000 + v
else
v = 1900 + v
end
end

One developer failed to explain, because he wasn't the guy who did this review and he didn't know the context.
The context was the it was inside one of the actions instead being separate method in controller or even in helper.
The tendency in Rails (accordind to its creators, and common sense) says that action code should be as simple as possible - in perfect world just calls to some methods and rendering page
In this case it should be something like

v = get_vine_vintage(params[:vintage])

or something, with method defined somewhere else. We always should keep controller actions code clean and readable.

After European RailsConf

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:44:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who met us at RailsConf in Berlin! It was nice to meet all of you and to hear the last tendencies in Rails development from principals.

This year event wasn't as popular as year before but i believe its all for good. After being known as a silver bullet for killing web projects that everyone wanted to hire, Rails is becoming de-facto one of the smartest options for small-medium size web projects.

Some update on our projects: we are running 3 projects for our Swiss clients at the moment, still working with one of the oldest and most valuable clients in US, looking forward to pick another US client which is a well-known web 2.0 site.

Rails Conference Europe '08

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:40:00 +0000

Don't forget to register on European Rails Conf that will be held 02-04.09 in Berlin, Germany!
OBS had a lot of fun there last year, same as on main event in Portland, OR.
Registration site:
europe.railsconf.org

See you at Railsconf!

OBS Labs Launches the First RoR Social Network Adult Site

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:04:00 +0000

Recently we released version one of Dominatrix (www.dominr.com)– the first Adult social network website based on RoR.
It was done in just a few weeks by Dmitry Vyazov, OBS Labs Senior RoR Developer.
Site offers popular features enabling people collaborate – private messages, photo galleries, blogs. In just a few days over 30 users already registered there. We hope that target audience will find this resource very useful
“Using Ruby on Rails helped us to run site fast and keep good possibilities for extending and scaling application”, Dmitry says.

Kyte: Check this out!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Mail Servers Update

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:51:00 +0000

We are in process of migration to the newer mail server.
Some of your emails to @obsgroup.biz may not be delivered

Please use "read report" option for all your emails to us with next two days.
Thank you!

New European Projects!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:14:00 +0000

After my trip to Berlin, Germany I am happy to announce that we are continue and extend our relations with European SW companies

We will continue work on billing and potentially other modules for Berlin-based startup with is on Medea-exchange market. Their new product hopefully will play a revolutionary role in B2B media exchange and sales and OBS is happy to be a part of it!
We just signed long term contract with a new Zürich, Swiss-based startup company. They are in development of unique health-style community site. We hope that our team would help them a lot in this project. At initial state a team of just Alex and Slava will work with them, but potentially we are going to extend these relations.

We are very happy to grow up our business in Europe and always looking for a new partners there as well as in States and all over the World.

Amazon Web Services Services

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:06:00 +0000

We are proud to start up a new project using Amazon Web Services(tm) technology.

Basically it's an innovation technology that allows you to scale your applications on data and computing as easy as never before.

Simple Storage Service (S3) - is a technology used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time on web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own services.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Just as S3 enables "storage in the cloud", Amazon EC2 enables "compute in the cloud". Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment.

OBS Labs is just a one of a very few groups all over the world who have so deep experience with AWS platform. If you are interested in our services as well please feel free to contact us!

Registration for RailsConf 2008 is now open!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:05:00 +0000

I already got mine, don't forget to register fast- it will be sold out quickly!
Register here: https://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/register

See you in Portland!

New projects updates

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:51:00 +0000

We got a bug rush on all projects after NY holidays here.

Here is just a few of projects we work now:

We finished Iteration 2 (Project management) of ERP system for US SEO and web development company. Now expecting some feedback on it and cant wait to continue with other modules.

Yesterday we also started development of new social network that will be focused on adult content. Its for our new UK client. We are doing it in a very rapid agile way so expecting to have good results within couple weeks.

I am also in a discussion of our partnership with Germany company that provides B2B services in media content exchange. They are seeking for provider to develop their billing and accounting subsystem. This going to be challenging and interesting task for couple of our developers. Hope after that we can continue our relations and i could visit Berlin again :)

Aslo we are on deadline week for our Team Management web site where we faced unexpected troubles with payment systems and need to replace it to paypal very urgently.

Bill Gates leaves Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:48:00 +0000

Anyway this guy made a lot for the industry.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 10:28:00 +0000

OBS Labs wishes Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to our clients, partners and friends!

Let New Year be successful for your life and business. And we are always near to bring your SW ideas to life!

PS: We have day offs within Dec 31st -Jan 3rd, but i am always on phone as usual.

Promote and sell with autoresponder application responderboy.com!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:07:00 +0000

Don't forget to check out application we now supporting www.responderboy.com
Its all-in-one solution for online marketing and sales. It would be specially interesting to German customers, as it was recently translated to German!

Web ERP solution? YES!

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:40:00 +0000

We just finished Iteration One of our new project. This is complex web ERP system for US company that offers SEO and web development services. System was coded on RoR and hosted on customer's internal server. At this iteration we implemented CRM module and part of proposal creating flow.
This revision includes following features:

User registrations with access permissions.
CRM dababase of clients with custom fields and search abilities.
Lead flow- process of creating new lead and tracking sales process
Proposal creating flow
Uploading unlimited documents
Tracking contact history (calls, emails)
Managing tasks
Tracking projects
Customizable UI with dashboard screen.

Above features were implemented in just a 2 weeks by our Sr. RoR developers Slava Dushin and Denis Rystsov. Great work, guys!

After client's testing we are going to continue our development. A lot of modules should be developed more: Accounting, Time Tracking, Project Management, Auto deploy content to client's web sites, automated SEO and submissions processes support.

-Vlad

Three ways to organize your team: co-located, outsourced, or global

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:30:00 +0000

I found this great post on http://blog.assembla.com/ by Andy Singleton.
I talked about global teams at latest rails conference in Berlin, also naming them the next "big thing" and trend. Andy could amazingly "repeat" my ideas. I fully agree with him!
The short idea is - outsourcing is not a way in ourdays. If someone just going to cut his budget putting some work to India, i bet 99% he will not be success. While global talents, skills and knowledge + newest communication technology born new phenomena of today: GLOBAL TEAMS
Absolute mustread!

When people see our process in action, they often call it "outsourcing", but actually, it's quite different. We work with single, unified, global teams. Nobody is "in" or "out". The shift from outsourcing to global teams is a big trend. This article will explain the difference and give readers some hints about choosing the correct organizational structure for any given project.

We can classify work at the level of a software team into three broad categories:

Co-located
This is the traditional group of people working together in an office.

Outsourced
An outsourcing arrangement involves two or more separate teams, with responsibilities divided explicitly between the teams. For example, the "in" team might be located in Boston and do specification, and the "out" team might be located in India and do implementation and testing.

Global team
A global team is distributed geographically, but it does not have a fixed division of responsibilities between locations. Work goes to the team member who is best able to do it.

What about Enterprise? If a big company can seamlessly coordinate its various offices, does that represent a different form of organization? It does not. Enterprise management actually breaks down into a combination of the three previous methods. No coordination is seamless, and the people that manage big companies understand that. So, they will break down projects into a combination of the three forms of organization described above. They will set up some local offices with co-located workers, and some global teams that are managed and funded as a single distributed team. At a larger scale, they divide working groups into cost centers with budgeting and chargeback arrangements that closely resemble outsourcing arrangements.

Co-located teams have an advantage in productivity, because communication is simple. Managers also feel they are easier to manage, because most managers have experience managing groups by personal interaction. However, they are increasingly difficult to arrange, because it's hard to get all of the necessary talent in one place. Geography makes it hard to get these teams together. In any given locality, there appears to be a talent shortage. And the natural and random movement of people makes it hard to keep them together. How hard? In the last year, I have not seen a single team bigger than eight people that was co-located.

Outsourcing has spread rapidly for reasons of cost, quality, and scalability. It achieves cost advantages by moving work to locations where people get paid less. It can achieve quality gains by moving work from organizations that don't offer a senior career path for the outsourced task (eg server admin) and don't offer wide experience, to organizations where specialists can get promoted in their specialty, and gain more experience. And, outsourcing arrangements have proven to be very scalable, with big companies able to make big purchases.

Unfortunately, the advantages of outsourcing are shrinking. The cost advantages have mostly dissipated because of wage increases and currency gains in "low cost" locations. The potential for quality gains has been limited by a focus on low cost and an depletion of the talent pool. The benefit of scalability is canceled out by the cost, in the form of risk, of problems in a big contract.

Specifically, outsourcing is a bad choice for the kind of product development work that I specialize in. There are three major problems that develop - quality, workload, and risk. First, the focus by most outsourcing firms on low cost and fixed pricing per "resource" means that they are motivated to give clients the cheapest or most available individual that meets any set of buzzword requirements. This works well in stable enterprise situations where predictability of process and year-on-year cost reduction is the explicit goal. In the business making new software products, individual talent is a huge variable that controls the productivity of the team and the quality of the output. Outsourcing arrangements are not designed to get clients the best individual talent, and in fact, can be disastrous. The second problem is that the explicit division of labor between teams leaves a lot of work for the client. To send a job "out", you have to do specification, and then acceptance testing. If the outsourcer is only doing implementation, it saves little or no work for the client. Other ways to divide the tasks produce similar workloads for the client. The third problem is risk. When a client hires an outsourcer, the client hires the management team, work process, work infrastructure, and implementation talent in one package. If any of those components don't work out, you have to unwind the whole process and start over from the beginning. That's costs a lot of time, money, and management attention, and is likely to be a fatal event for a startup. Hiring an outsourcer is a lot like hiring an individual contributor. No matter how careful your interview process is, a new hire has only about a 50% chance of working out for both sides in the long term. So, a startup accepting an outsourcing deal, without the resources to start over, runs a 50% risk of total failure. And, it takes extra time to get started because you have to carefully qualify candidates and manage this risk.

So, we have focused our energy on the third way of organizing - the single global team. It's more challenging to manage than a co-located team, so we have studied the tools and processes that make a global team easy to manage. Most software teams are distributed, so they need these tools and processes anyway. We believe that any loss of efficiency is more than made up by the savings in time from not moving people around. Global recruiting relieves the talent shortage.

We have also worked to solve the specific problems we identified in the outsourcing model. We raise quality and productivity, sometimes dramatically, by qualifying each individual with competitive trials. We qualify people who are good enough to perform the complete range of tasks required, and we distribute everything to the team, from initial design discussions to final delivery and customer support. It becomes a unified organization where everyone is "in" and ready to work on any task. Finally, we reduce risk by not sending things "out" in big chunks. Everyone is hired individually, including the team lead. All IP, including discussions, code, build processes, etc. is held on the Internet under the control of the client. So, if you need to make any changes on the team, you can bring new people in one by one without massive disruption. Risks are small and incremental.

Unified global teams are the next big trend. Work with one today.

Posted by Andy Singleton on Sun, Dec 09, 2007 @ 06:13 PM

Check this out: Syncmyteam.com

noreply@blogger.com (Vladimir Gurgov) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:10:00 +0000

You may try out this exciting site we released recently www.syncmyteam.com

In short its a Projects/Tasks management similar to Basecamp. But it still has some unique features and may be interested to German-speaking users as it has German UI as an option.

Congratulations to Patrick Holzer Swiss-based Entrepreneur and our valuable client!
Our senior RoR developer, Slava Dushin, worked on this project for about 1 month, design was done by SofaMade professional web 2.0 design studio