Squeejee

Build an App, Start a Movement. Our RailsConf 2009 talk

Thu, 07 May 2009 18:29:57 GMT

Build An App Start A Movement

View more presentations from Wynn Netherland.

Tweet Congress 2.0

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:52:04 GMT

What’s new?

Here’s a quick list of some of the cool new features in the site:

Searchable tweetstreams This is big folks. Just take a look at all the folks in Congress who tweeted about the stimulus
Powerful list filters The old site had a number of useful lists. We’ve combined those into a single view to let you slice and dice the directory any way you want. Go ahead and filter by party, tweeting status, state, etc.
Slick new zoomable follower charts Follower charts now let you zoom on the date axis
Backchannel This is your chance to talk back to Congress. Just include the #tweetcongress hashtag
Auto-linked text You asked, we listened. Now @usernames, #hashtags, and URLs in tweets are auto linked in the tweetstream and RSS feeds.
New stats rankings We now display rankings for follower count for Twitter overall, for Congress, and for party. We also show the most conversational and political tweeters based on @replies and tweet political content.

What’s missing?

We have disabled the petitions for now. Stay tuned for more powerful petition features coming soon. Also many old URLs may be broken. We’ll create some redirection on our end to patch up a few of these, but many will just not work. Please update your bookmarks.

Let us hear from you!

Got feedback? Drop us a line on the Feedback tab on the site and let us know your ideas, beefs, or kudos.

TweetCongress wins at SXSW!

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:51:16 GMT

TweetCongress, our Twitter directory for the folks in Congress took home a Web Award at the 2009 SXSW Conference in Austin. We’re humbled to even be nominated alongside great sites like I Am Second.

Thanks everyone who has helped us. We’re up to 110 tweeters in Congress. Help us spread the word to reach all 535!

Read the full story on Mashable or Wired

A fresh coat of wax

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:55:57 GMT

One of the challenges of doing web work for other folks is it seems you never quite have the time to invest into your own site. Our old site wasn’t bad, but we felt that it hadn’t kept up with the company. We wanted a visual identity that matched our team.

The look

Since Chris McCroskey is such an avid comic book reader, he had the great idea of getting some professional artwork done and bringing some personality to the site. Cal Slayton did an awesome job on drawing each of us and really bringing us to life in cartoon form.

The result was our own take on Ghost Busters, but instead of scary ghosts and monsters, we battle bad code and scope creep!

The platform

An important goal for the redesign was to lower the overhead of keeping it up-to-date. We discovered Webby, a Ruby tool that makes it incredibly simple to create dynamic web sites and deploy them as static content. Since we hang out in a our favorite text editor all day, Webby lets us add pages and blog articles as naturally as any other task. We no longer have to write within the confines of a teeny textarea.

Comments

Since Webby isn’t a server, we needed a way to support comments on our blog posts. There are a number of free tools popping up that let you outsource your comments including IntenseDebate and JS-Kit. We decided to use Disqus because it was the easiest for us to use and import our older comments.

Twitter feed

We’ve long had a Tweetstream on Locomotivation, our programming and technology blog. Since the server-side approach we used there would not work on a static site, we went looking for alternatives. I found Tweet from seaofclouds.

With a slight modification to support multiple users, we were up and running with a pure jQuery solution. Woot!

Hope you like the new site!

Squeejee's New Look

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 01:59:29 GMT

Squeejee will soon be undergoing a face lift! In the meantime enjoy the cartoon versions of a few members of the Squeejee Team. If you need a “Mop Up” on some old code or a dynamic Commando style code assault to knock out your greenfield application fast, we’re your guys!

Why We Bill by the Hour

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:50:52 GMT

In the last month or so, I have had a ton of calls with prospective clients. All the calls inevitably wind their way to “price”. Most want a bid for a project and that’s where the fun begins.

We don’t do fixed bid

We bill our clients hourly for our expertise. Most potential clients have been conditioned to consider only a fixed bid. The biggest reason is because they have a set budget. You can bill hourly and still work within the confines of a budget (and I believe you can do it better with an agile methodology).

Why bill hourly?

It’s been my experience previously working at Compaq and later starting up our own business six years ago that in a fixed bid situation, either the client gets taken to the cleaners or the developers do. With fixed bid, the requirements of a project have to be so locked down and fine grained that there is no flexibility. If requirements change, costs for the developer can spin out of control. For a developer to make profit, they have to bid the project up really high to cover any unforeseen scope creep. Business as usual (fixed bid) just didn’t make sense to us.

Our perspective

We do software development at an hourly rate, delivering quality code and constantly interact with our clients as we iterate for them. Because of our agile process, two week sprints, and constant communication with our clients, we actually save them money. When a client sees their ideas take shape and can bang on it in a couple of weeks, they quickly see what works and what doesn’t. This saves money!

Take a fixed bid, waterfall method, for example, and they would see that piece of functionality when it was at completion and there is nothing they can do about it, and they had to pay for it. With an hourly bill rate, the customer always has his foot on the gas pedal. Say we just finish up the third sprint and the customer decides he’s ready to go live even before his feature list is complete. With fixed bid, the client would have been locked in and would have given us half up front. In the agile approach, not only does he save money, he’s making money ahead of schedule, too!

Bottom line: Squeejee believes that billing hourly offers more flexibility and cost savings for our client and is fair to us. Now that’s a win-win.

Free advice for AT&T

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:56:32 GMT

1. Don’t make me wait for over a week to have your Business Account Specialist finally get back to me! We left this guy more messages than I can count.

2. Why would you ask me for a $250 deposit for each line! Seriously this was the craziest thing I had ever heard. They did a credit check on our company. They see we have been profitable for six years with no debt and they still asked for what would have worked out to a $1,250 deposit. When we protested they waived it immediately. That really hacked me off because it made me think they were just trying to take advantage of any business that was dumb enough to accept their terms. DON’T CHARGE DEPOSITS FOR ESTABLISHED COMPANIES!!!

3. The customer service reps we have talked to have all been horrible! I suggest you only hire ex-cheerleaders for your customer service dept. At least they can sound excited.

4. Don’t make me fill out more paperwork than I did when I bought my house!

5. Please give me the option to overnight my new phones instead of the 5 to 7 day shipping you offer.

6. When I call in to AT&T from either my AT&T cellphone or AT&T land line, why do I have to tell you what number I am calling from? Can’t you use the same caller ID you sell me every month?

Feel free to add your own suggestions for improving AT&T’s customer service in the comments. I’m positive they’ll be reading this ;-)

Stealth client request

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:09:17 GMT

Check out this email we received from a “potential client” (wink, wink). As soon as I read this it reminded me of Alex Muse’s blog post, Avoid Undue Diligence like the Plague. The first thing that really makes me laugh is that Eddy can’t even tell me the name of the company he is asking Squeejee to work for. The last time I entered into negotiations with a secret company I ended up mopping alien slime from floors and scooping poop from a talking dog (I later found out the name of the company was M.I.B.). All kidding aside, why would you ever offer up any details about your business to someone who doesn’t even trust you enough to tell you their name? You can read my response to Eddy below.

From: Eddy XXX <eddy.xxx@gmail.com> Date: Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 8:07 AM Subject: Ruby on Rails Developer Requirement To: wynn@praexis.com

I’m a Quality Services Manager of a San Fransico Bay based Email Campaign Product Inc. and I am try to gather information that will support our offshore Development decision. Our privacy policy does not allow me to disclose further information regarding our company.

I am looking for information related to hourly rates, maturity of infrastructure, technical skills and communication options (direct vs onsite or in country). We need 2-3 ROR developers with 2 years of exp. for more than 3 months with work on our social networking themed product to be launched by end of this year. Since I am in a tour in India I will not be able to be on a call/chat for direct interactions till mid of august. I am expecting a complete proposal with few sample work in ROR. bq. Please let me know if you can help with this request. bq. I look forward to working with you.

Eddy

Dear Eddy,

We would love to help your San Francisco Bay based company with your RoR needs. We can start in August as that is the time we will be finished with a very lucrative project. You see we are helping another confidential and secret client that has vast holdings in Nigeria. We are helping them move a large amount of money and our fee is $38,000,000! Thanks Prince Isa Ahmed, General Abacha will never get his hands on your Father’s money now. So Eddy to answer you other question about rate. Based on our past Nigerian deals our hourly rate works out to $412,468.00 USD an hour. Our infrastructure is very mature and when it’s not we make it sit in the corner. Our technical skills are very technical and our communication can be multi-national as you have seen with our work in Nigeria. We would love to work with your GREAT company even though we don’t know who you are or what you do.

Thanks in advance, Chris McCroskey Squeejee

Things to Do if You Want to Work for Squeejee

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:29:17 GMT

We recently posted an ad on Craigslist and The Texas Startup Blog for a Designer/CSS Guru position we are trying to fill. After getting at least 50 e-mails inquiring about the job here are few points you should follow when trying to get any design job.
1. Always, always, always send examples of your work! You would be surprised at how many emails with resumes that had no examples of past design work.
2. The bulk of the resumes we received were Word docs. I don’t have a huge problem with Word docs but why not send out a .pdf? Help me help you.
3. We placed the Craigslist ad in multiple cities and got the same exact e-mail from some job hunters for all three cities. What this tells me is that you have no attention to detail. If you paid the slightest bit of attention you would know that you had already applied for this job. This makes me think that you really aren’t interested in our gig, but just shotgunning out your resume in the hopes that you get ANY job.
4. I don’t mind if you have used templates in the past, but please show me some original designs!

The good news is that we have found a hand full of really talented Designers that we will be interviewing.

We're Hiring!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:00:05 GMT

We are looking for a strong design-oriented front end developer to help design user interfaces as well as translate from Photoshop comps to XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. Ideal person would want to learn Rails and help give design eye for the developer guys on our team.

Required Experience:

Graphic design, UI design and Photoshop experience
Standards compliant HTML and CSS skills
Familiarity with popular Javascript frameworks including jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous or MooTools

Bonus skills:

Mad vector skills including Adobe Illustrator or other tool
Server framework fu, like PHP, Java, or ASP.NET
Ruby on Rails experience or willing to learn

Perks:

Work from home
Flexible hours

Working on Vacation Is Great!

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:36:54 GMT

This week I am on vacation in Jackson Hole, WY and Wynn and Jim are both in San Antonio at Sea World. You would think that having all three of the Squeejee founders on vacation at the same time would be a problem but it’s not. Today I received two phone calls from perspective customers (it’s always great when they call you :). I promptly returned both calls and closed one deal right over the phone with the other still in the pipe. I pulled out my Mac, shot off an e-mail to Wynn and Jim, setup a call with the client for tomorrow and BAM we are off and running with a new client. There has never been a better time to be a small business owner! With the prevalence of cell coverage and high-speed internet access you can do business anywhere and you can’t beat the view.

Tweet Tweet

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:40:23 GMT

Not long ago there wasn’t a Tweet to be heard among the Squeejee team. To tell you the truth I just didn’t get the point. I finally broke down about a month ago and I am hooked. The Squeejee team exploded in a cacophony of Twitter Tweets while we were in Portland, OR for RailsConf. It was great to be able to see what each member of the team was doing at any given moment. I knew what sessions the guys were in, whether they were good or bad, what bar to go to and even who was winning Werewolf. Doesn’t sound like much but it was. Twitter augmented our communications while we were at the conference and it allows you to see a more personal side of your employees. I now find Twitter a part of my daily routine. The only problem is that Twitter is always down! Hopefully Twitter will get their act together, if not this new Microblogger will be tweeting elsewhere.

Squeejee Creates a Sparkling New iPhone Site for Mindbites

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:13:58 GMT

Our latest work for Mindbites.com included a great new iPhone site. Take a look at the video and let us know what you think. If you need squeaky clean iPhone presence for your site let us know.

Bryan's Shoes

Sat, 31 May 2008 16:58:45 GMT

Bryan getting accosted by an old lady on the streets of Portland, OR.

RailsConf in Portland

Sat, 31 May 2008 11:54:41 GMT

As we were walking to a restaurant last night an old crazy lady told Bryan to buy new shoes! I guess she didn’t like his fashion forward white European bowlers. We sat in on some great sessions at the conference today. The Entrepreneurs on Rails was by far my favorite. We got a great treat when we checked into the DoubleTree hotel today. They told us they had upgraded our room to the Presidential Suite! The only hitch was that the room only had one king bed and we have five guys. They remedied the situation with roll away beds in the corner of our massive living room. It’s nice having a full size hot tub and wet bar in the room. I think we’ll have a party on Sunday night. Portland heard that Squeejee was coming to town so they put their best foot forward and had a massive fireworks display that we watched from our 14th floor private balcony. Life is hard for the Squeejee Team.

See you at RailsConf!

Wed, 28 May 2008 10:24:55 GMT

We are heading to RailsConf in Portland for our second year in a row. If you’re going to be there look us up. We are excited to see what RailsConf will prompt this year. Last year it was the catalyst for our name change from Praexis to Squeejee. This year we may change our opinion that Miller Lite tastes great to less filling.

Startup hubs

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:27:25 GMT

I admit it, I’m an avid Paul Graham fanboy. But on the topic of startup hubs, I have to side with