Quick Left Blog

Dispatches from Class: How Your Website Boils Down to 1s and 0s. Part 2.

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 -0000

In the previous post I explained how computers store data internally. Everything is stored as a base 2, binary number, then that number can be taken at face value (if treated as an integer), mapped to a character (if it represents text), or interpreted differently based on the use case. We’re now in a position to understand how computers execute binary instructions.

Computer are actually quite dumb machines, and as such they can only execute very simple instructions. They can add. They can multiply. They can move data from one location to another. Add in a few other math instructions and you’ve essentially named everything your CPU can do at the base level. The tasks that a given computer can perform are defined in its instruction set architecture (ISA). I’m typing this on a Macbook Pro with an Intel i7 processor, so my computer can execute all the instructions defined for an Intel x86-64 processor.

Processors understand a language called assembly. Assembly is a low-level language that implements basic functions like adding, moving data, and loading memory addresses. Let’s look at an example.

Here’s a very simple C++ program that adds the integers 1 and 2 together and outputs the result.

When you run this program, it’s tempting to imagine the computer executing each line as we ourselves read it. What actually happens is that the code above is compiled into assembly, which the processor can then execute. Think of assembly as the way you’d explain code to a 6 year old. Instead of printing the result of one + two, for example, you would 1) store the variable one 2) store the variable two 3) add them together 4) store the result somewhere 4) call the print routine and pass in the result you just computed. It’s a much more verbose, but explicit, way of doing things. Here is the assembly generated from the above C++ code:

Understanding each line of that assembly code is beyond the scope of this post, but let’s look at 4 lines as a sample of what assembly does:

Each line has three ingredients: the instruction, the source, and target. In line 1, the instruction is movl, meaning “move.” The source is $0x1, meaning the hexadecimal number for 1, and the target is -0x8(%rbp). To decipher this target, add the first number (-8 in this hex format) to the address of %rbp (%rbp is a register, which you can think of as a variable). Altogether, line 1 says, “move the integer 1 into the address on our stack that is 8 bytes below %rbp.” When I said assembly is very explicit, I wasn’t kidding.

Line 2 does more of the same; it moves the integer 2 into a memory address on our stack. Line 3 uses -0x8(%rbp) as our source, which you’ll recognize as the target from line 1. After line 3 is executed, %eax holds the number 1 and -0xc(%rbp) holds the number 2.

The actual addition happens on line 4. The instruction is an add, the source is -0xc(%rbp), and the target is %eax. In English this means, “add the values in -0xc(%rbp) and %eax together, and store the result in %eax.” This is the CPU adding 1 and 2 together and storing the result in a variable.

Now we are almost down to the layer of 1s and 0s. The final step is to map our assembly instructions into their corresponding bytecode numbers. Each instruction and register has a unique identifying bytecode number. I used a program called gobjdump to translate my human-readable assembly into bytecode. Here’s the result:

The hex numbers to the left of each line show how they translate to bytecode. Altogether, they become:

c7 45 f8 01 00 00 00 c7 45 f4 02 00 00 00 8b 45 f8 03 45 f4

Huzzah! We’ve gotten to the point where a complete program is boiled down to hexadecimal numbers. The last step is convert these hexademical numbers to binary (this hex chart lays out the mapping):

110001110100010111110000000100000000000000000000000011000111010001011111010000000010000000000000000000000000100010110100010111111000000000110100010111110100

And there you have it. (Note that the binary string above represents just the 4 lines of assembly I highlighted above. The full bytecode program would be much longer).

The JavaScript and Ruby you write undergo this same process when executed, except that they’re not compiled up front. They undergo JIT (just-in-time) compiling, meaning a block or line of code waits to be compiled until the last minute. You’ve seen how much assembly is generated from a simple program that adds integers. Since JavaScript makes it trivial to use complex data structures like objects, each line can translate to tens or even hundreds of assembly instructions.

I’ve purposefully stripped out a ton of detail from this top-level post. If anything is confusing or you think deserves expanding, let me know in the comments.

Guest Blog: Brian Baker on UX, The Final Frontier

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0000

We're hosting BoulderUX Wednesday, May 22 with guest speaker Brian Baker of The First User, the recognized authority in User Experience for consumer electronics, as well as a thought-leader in the User Experience of mobile apps, websites, outdoor gear, and automotive experience. We asked him to provide us with a guest post hinting at what you'll hear when you attend the event. Register for the Meetup. Space is limited.

I’ve been calling User Experience (UX) the ‘final frontier’ of product development for some time now, and people often ask why I use that title.

I call it the final frontier because UX is the ONLY discipline that emphasizes customers through every stage of product development and at every touchpoint between the customer and your company.

Other methodologies cover only a portion of the processes used to create product, and the end result often falls short of user expectations. For example, most designers would say they practice ‘user-centered’ design, yet the world is full of product that is obviously NOT user-centered. This is a result of designs being altered in development, AFTER the designer has left the process. But the user needs to be considered throughout a product cycle, not in just one part of a cycle.

Agile, Waterfall, Just-in-Time, Six Sigma and Kanban -- all fail to account for the entire cycle of product development. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Agile and Kanban, but they only cover a portion of what it takes to create a successful product. Where is Agile in the design phase of a product? Where is Just-in-Time manufacturing with regards to customer service? They don’t cover that.

But UX does. When properly installed in development and throughout the culture of an organization, the practice of Great UX essentially puts the voice of the customer at every touchpoint between a company and its customers:

The ideation phase of a product is built on UX market studies.
The design stage integrates user testing to keep on track.
Software or hardware development is iterated through user feedback and prototyping.
Marketing uses the personas created during the UX market study to craft the right messaging at product launch.
Customer service and support baselines are built on the UX market study (what does the customer want?) and user testing (how does the customer use the product?).

Great product is about more than just great design, software development, or manufacturing protocols -- it’s about recognizing the customer throughout the entire product lifecycle and in every facet of your organization. The greatest product companies in the world adhere to this practice daily -- think Apple, Disney, and Virgin; User Experience is simply the name of this practice. It’s repeatable, and it’s sustainable, and it works; and that’s why I refer to it as the final frontier.

Brian Baker was the founder of the leading Usability shop in San Francisco during the dot-com, and is now the Managing Partner of The First User in Boulder, CO. The First User is a top-tier User Experience (UX) firm with clients in mobile, venture-funded startups, web and outdoor gear.

Mr. Baker believes that UX is the final frontier of product development, and teaches his clients how to make truly user-centered product... product that is a joy to use and interact with.

Mr. Baker often speaks on the topic of UX, product development, and how Great UX can sharply increase ROI. He sits on three boards, has three current investments in CE and mobile, and motorcycles through the Rockies in his spare time.

“Big Data” Analysis Becoming a Common Tool in the Developer’s Toolkit

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 -0000

The first recorded use of cryptography in warfare was by Julius Caesar in the first century BCE. He used a substitution cipher to encrypt his plans and personal correspondence, substituting each plaintext letter in the message with the letter a fixed number of letters away in the alphabet. A might be written as D, then B would be E, C would be F, etc. Today this is often referred to as the Caesar cipher thanks to Julius’ favor of the technique.

Today any message encrypted using a solely a substitution cipher would be viewed as laughably insecure. Decoding them is frequently a challenge given to children as homework and adult fans of the newspaper puzzle section. However, as simple a form of security it seems to us now, it was sufficient to keep Caesar’s messages secret for a thousand years. It wasn’t until the 9th century renaissance of mathematics in the Middle East that sufficient knowledge of linguistics, statistics, and frequency analysis existed all in once place for a system of solving the Caesar cipher to be developed.

These convergences come a lot more frequently nowadays, what with so much of our learning driven by technological advances. I was thinking about this bit of history as I toured the presentations at last week’s “Big Data Science Fair” sponsored by Precog and GNIP. Fifteen CU graduate students from Professor Tom Yeh’s Big Data class proved this as they presented their semester projects, science fair style, along with about a dozen representatives of corporate enterprises.

“Big Data” was once inscrutable to the masses. The infrastructure to collect and store giant data sets was, until very recently, very costly. Tools to access and combine them were rudimentary. The expertise needed to analyze them, rare. But, like military cryptography eventually sharing space with the crossword puzzle, Big Data analysis is now within the grasp of any technical person.

The number of data sets available alone shows how much there is to work with now. The presenters used data diverse as online video catalogs, recordings of multiplayer Xbox game sessions, logs from a biomedical instrument, websites for reuniting lost pets, as well as public data from Twitter and Google.

Computer science graduate student Greg Guyles captivated much of the room with his project “Aggregated Entertainment” which analyzed the Twitter mentions of big-event TV airings to reveal different tweeting patterns for different genera of shows. Walking Dead mentions consistently spike when something gruesome and violent happens. American Idol mentions peak every time a new contestant performs. His setup paired digital video along with a graph of Twitter mentions for the show so that users could scroll to see the action that Tweeters were talking about. Greg took home the “Most Impactful Insight’ award for the evening, as well as the Judges Choice award.

Dave Elchoness, CEO of TagWhat, showed off “Feed For iPhone: Deals Culled from Social Media Worldwide.” The Feed iPhone App (available on the iTunes App store) automatically finds businesses that are offering deals and uses the iPhone’s location services to deliver ones nearby to the user. The availability of Facebook’s graph search and Twitter’s public API make it possible to sort through posts for special bargains without users having to follow specific businesses. Dave was awarded the “The Creative Champion” award for the night.

There were more projects on display than I could fully explore before the awards were given out. If you want to see the full list of student and corporate projects, as well as all the award winners, you can find them on Precog’s website for the event. Clearly, with the tools of Big Data now open to all computer programmers, hobbyists, grad students, and researchers, we can expect to see even more creative and useful products every day.

Boulder Startup Week Returns - Mo bigger and Mo betta

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Boulder Startup Week is less than a week away and you betcha Quick Left is participating! From startup crawls to chair racing brawls, we'll be doing it all! We'd love to see your entrepreneurial spirit for #BSW13 so join us, ok y'all!?

Bikes and Bytes Hackfest
Tuesday, May 14
6-9:30 PM

Though not technically a part of Boulder Startup Week, we invite you to attend the unofficial-official-get-your-geek-on-pre-party event. In celebration of National Bike Month, bike geeks and computer geeks (one and the same) will come together Tuesday, May 14 at our Bikes and Bytes Hackfest. While the good times are a spinnin' and swag is a flowin', developers will be challenged to come up with bike-themed mobile or web applications in three hours or less.

Ignite Boulder 21
Wednesday, May 15
6-9 PM

We've been an Ignite Boulder sponsor since the beginning and even have four Ignite alums in our office. Bonus points if you can guess who those alums are. While Ignite Boulder is sold out, you could win a pair of tickets if you attend our hackfest the night before. Must be present to win.

Boulder Startup Crawl
Thursday, May 16
Start at Shine restaurant at 1:30 PM
Crawl from 3-6 PM

Attendees will crawl around downtown Boulder visiting different offices and learning how awesome each one is. Here at Quick Left, we'll have a hot dog stand, beer in the keg, and be playing rapid rounds of corn hole. We hope to see you starting around 4 pm! As the crawl wraps up, everyone is welcome to Boulder Beta at Absinthe House starting at 6 pm. Use the hashtag #BoulderStartupCrawl when tweeting and crawling.

House of Genius - Open House
Friday, May 17
12-1:30 PM

QL's managing director Bing Chou, also Boulder's organizer of House of Genius, invites you to join him while he hosts an Open House for the usually invite-only event. This is a unique opportunity for the public to see what goes on during, and have a chance to participate in, a House of Genius session. There is one important caveat: Attendees cannot share their names, backgrounds, or employers until the end of the night. This creates an environment that encourages free thinking and open dialogue.

The Quickest Left Office Chair Race
Friday, May 17
4-6 PM

Ten teams of 4 will hit the streets of Boulder rolling in the first ever office chair scavenger hunt race extravaganza thingy. Each team will bring their own modified office chair to race (visit Citron Workspaces to pick up your FREE chair to modify), find clues, and solve challenges involving local startups, investment firms and businesses around town. Grab your mates, fix up your chair, and join us for a fun and exciting way to get our geek on in the streets of Boulder....in an office chair. And yes, we'll be outfitting teams with GoPros to film the madness AND put to use our new NodeCopter.

BSW & BMoCA Unplug | Recharge
Friday, May 17
7-9 PM

None other than Quick Left's Operations Manager/in-house artist/rainbow maker, Ali Schultz, is hosting the #BSW13 & BMoCa Unplug event Friday night. Enjoy performances from musician Harper Phillips, performance artist Tara Rynders and peruse BMoCA's current exhibition, Museum of Broken Relationships. Sit back and enjoy stories from esteemed leaders in the Boulder Startup community as interpreted by Boulder's own Playback Theater West. Believe us, you have never heard, or seen, these stories like this before.

So once you mark your calendar to attend each of our events, check out Boulder Startup Week's full schedule. No shortage of activities to choose from.

My First Open Angel Forum

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Having tried to get my own start up into Open Angel Forum last year, it was fun to attend last week’s OAF as a sponsor with Quick Left. We've sponsored the last three sessions in both spring and fall and will continue to support this event because it provides entrepreneurs free and open access to the angel investors that they need.

For those that aren't familiar with OAF, here's the spiel:

The Open Angel Forum (OAF) is dedicated to providing entrepreneurs with access to the angel investor community based solely on merit (and without fees). Additionally, we strive to build collaboration between angel investors and to inspire high-net worth individuals to become angels. We are firmly committed to fighting against “pay-to-pitch” schemes.

I’d heard stories of JCal (Jason Calacanis) yelling, “I’m in!” 30 seconds into a pitch followed by a high-stakes poker game at TechStars. Wednesday’s edition may have been a bit more restrained, but no less intriguing. Six lucky entrepreneurs, briefly recapped below, pitched their business to over 30 angel investors in attendance.

Conspire uses your email to generate social analytics.
Goodcall.io came all the way from Australia to present a new model to outsource upselling.
Rental Kharma lets you use your rental history to improve your credit score.
RxRevu presents cost-advantageous alternatives to your current medications.
Open Road Snacks started with Rocky Mountain Popcorn (the ready-to-eat, bagged popcorn in more than 25,000 convenience stores) and are expanding their product offering. I can attest, good stuff.
Getist is a free shopping tool that brings the boutique to the blog.

The entrepreneurs each did an admirable job of presenting to a room full of investors while appearing relaxed - beer in hand, used as a pointer. The best part was meeting so many great people who are major contributors to our local startup community. Thanks to Rob and Alex of PivotDesk, Tim Falls and David Cohen for organizing the Boulder OAF and to Techstars for hosting and providing such a great forum to help startups launch.

The Quickest Left - The Quick Left Office Chair Race

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0000

So you wanna be a rock superstar and live large? A big house, five cars, you’re in charge. Yeah, me too! Good news, Quick Left wants to make your dreams come true. Wat?! Exactly.

In honor of Boulder Startup Week, fun times, and good ole fashion competition, we are taking our office chairs to the streets. On Friday, May 17 at 4:00 pm the race flag drops and the madness begins. Starting at Quick Left, ten teams of 4 will hit the streets of Boulder rolling in their tricked out chairs. Try to picture it if you can like mash a up of “Pimp My Ride”, “Amazing Race”, and “Roller Derby”. Clues, hot dogs, challenges, orienteering, beer, sprinting, high fives, and so much more await these brave teams all while trying to get 1 member of their team pushed/pulled/towed/or dragged to the finish line first in their chair of choice.

Got your blood pumping and curiosity peaked? Of course I do, keep reading.

Rules:

Chairs can/should be modified, decorated, and pimped out but cannot contain an engine.
One person must remain seated in the chair at all times.
Team must wheel to 10 places on the map and collect 10 souvenirs from each location.
Team must tweet with the hashtag #QLChairRace once they arrive at locations
The first person to the final destination with all 10 souvenirs + 10 team tweets wins.
The final destination is not noted, it will be mentioned in a riddle at one of the stops.
Every racing participant must sign a liability waiver.
Don't have a chair? No problem. Visit Citron Workspaces Monday 12:00 – 3:30, Tuesday from 10:00 – 12:00 or Thursday from 12:00 to 4:00 and pick out a FREE chair to pimp.

Awards:

Best Office Chair/Team Compilation - Knoll will award the "Golden Office" chair to this winning team
Overall winner of the Quickest Left Chair Race - Citron Workspaces will supply 4 SaWEET chairs to the winning team.

Here is a list of things I hope to see:

Jorts... lots and lots of jorts
A chair that has a mini keg on it
Banana Hammocks
Geeks beating Jocks
A Unicorn

There you have it folks. This race has something for everyone and is pretty much going to be the best thing you have ever been to. Ever. Now that you are dying to race go ahead and click on over to registration and enter the super secret password "**OfficeChairRace2013**" and get registered. Go now, seriously right now, space is limited. If you don’t have 3 friends who want to make a team with you sad kitty BUT cheer up Charlie come watch and heckle the spectacle.

-Rubin’ is Racin’

Bikes and Bytes Hackfest - May 14

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Cogs and Code. Bikes and Bytes. Geeks and Gears.

It's no secret that Quick Left is a bike-centric workplace (even our name is bike related). In celebration of National Bike Month and kicking off Boulder Startup Week, bike geeks and computer geeks (one and the same) will come together Tuesday, May 14 at our Bikes and Bytes Hackfest, where developers will be challenged to come up with bike-themed mobile or web applications in three hours or less.

Sell Tickets through Eventbrite

You can scrape datapoints from Strava, use APIs from Training Peaks or MapMyFitness, use your own Garmin data or access open datasets. So it might be beneficial to have a bike geek on your team to spearhead ideas. And if you ride your bike to the event, you can also get sweet QL and People for Bikes gear. Don't worry about your sweet pony, we'll have bike valet. We'll have People for Bikes, Stages Cycling, Training Peaks, FasCat, Feedback Sports, and more two-wheeled companies here, too. Beer, food, swag and more so you should probably just go ahead and register.

For those cyclists in attendance, we'll host power meter races, award longest bike commute and most tricked out commuter. Yeah, we love everything two wheels. One grand prize hacking team will also win a power meter from Stages Cycling valued at $800 MSRP.

And just for giggles, here's a QL throwback. See if you can spot our CEO. We're getting mouse pads, wallets and life-size cutouts made.

About the sponsors:
Stages Cycling LLC, based in Boulder, CO, launched the Stages Power meter at interbike in September 2012. Stages Power immediately made waves in the power measurement category with its high-tech feature set, including: an extremely low 20g weight, unique direct left sided direct measure design, and economical cost. Since hitting the retail market in February 2013, Stages Power has become a compelling choice for any cyclist — road or mountain; pro or amateur — looking to train with power. Read more at www.stagescycling.com

PeopleForBikes.org is a national movement to transform America through bicycling. By uniting a million riders, PeopleForBikes.org to speak with one, powerful voice to make bicycling safer, more convenient, and more appealing for everyone. It currently counts nearly 700,000 supporters and is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. www.peopleforbikes.org

Training Peaks, founded in 1999 by athletes and coaches, Peaksware, LLC, develops software for endurance coaches and motivated individuals, to monitor, analyze and plan their fitness and nutrition for peak performance. Peaksware’s suite of products include the world’s leading web based training log and food journal, TrainingPeaks.com accessed online and through iOS and Android applications; PC desktop analysis software, WKO+; and a family of GPS activity tracking apps for iPhones including Run Tracker Pro, Cycle Tracker Pro and Walk Tracker Pro. www.trainingpeaks.com

Dispatches from Class: How Your Website Boils Down to 1s and 0s

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0000

In Part I I'll explain how computers read 1s and 0s. Part II explains how software emerges from these numbers.

Most people know that 1s and 0s are the foundation for everything that happens inside a computer. What often isn’t so clear is what these 1s and 0s are actually doing. How does the text on your screen materialize from 1s and 0s? How can such complex applications--which include graphics, user interaction, you name it--all boil down to a string of binary?

To answer this question, we need to first look at the numbering system we’re all familiar with: base 10. When you read a number like 4012, you interpret its value based on the position of its parts:

It’s called base 10 because we’re multiplying each digit by a power of 10, then adding them up.

But what if we didn’t want to use 10? What would happen if we used, say, base 2?

To take the final step into binary we’ll restrict the digits we can use to only 1 and 0. This means instead of numbers like 15, 36, and 4, we’ll see numbers like 1111, 100100, and 100 respectively. Let’s look at an example up close:

So 100100 translates to 36. This is how computers store and read numbers internally. (This applies to positive integers. It gets a little more complicated with negatives and a lot more complicated with decimals. I’m happy to explain how those work if there’s interest.)

But of course you’re reading text, not a list of integers. Computers translate numbers to letters through a simple chart. The capital letter D, for example, maps to the number 68 in ASCII encoding. Here's a chart that shows the mapping for the full English alphabet. To spell my name in all capitals, we would say:

Each letter corresponds to a unique number. Let’s convert those base 10 numbers to binary:

So my name in binary (in ASCII encoding) is: 1000100 1000001 1010110 1001001 1000100.

When we save that value to a variable, we’re telling the computer to treat that sequence of numbers as a string of letters. We do this by declaring the variable as an array of characters (in statically typed languages), or by just putting quotations around the letters and letting the computer assume we’re saving letters (dynamically typed languages).

That exact same string of binary could mean something totally different depending on how we interpret it. Above we’ve assumed it maps to a string of letters, but we could also interpret it as a base 10 integer:

10001001000001101011010010011000100 = 18,391,344,324

The point is that the same string of binary can mean many different things, depending on how we choose to interpret the bits. This is how we can represent letters, words, integers, arrays, pretty much anything, using binary.

Now that we have a basic understanding of how computers store data, we’re set up to learn how different interpretations of these bits ends up as software. Check back for part II of this post, where we’ll build up arrangements of binary into a working program.

Update: Part II is live.
See more blog posts from this series.

Startup Weekend Boulder is Back for 2013

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0000

On April 26-28, Startup Weekend is coming back to Boulder for the sixth year and should be one of the best yet. With great speakers lined up along with some of Quick Left's finest mentors participating (Jessica Dillon, David Aragon, and Bob Bonifield), you won't want to miss this event taking place at TechStars Boulder.

There's a few more tickets left, too. Not familiar with Startup Weekend? Read on!

The Event

All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54-hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback. Whether entrepreneurs found companies, find a technical co-founder, meet someone new, or learn a skill far outside their usual 9-to-5, everyone is guaranteed to leave the event better prepared to navigate the chaotic but fun world of startups.

The Value

First and foremost, Startup Weekends are about experiential education. Participants don’t just listen to theory, but build their own and truly put it to the test while collaborating with like-minded, passionate individuals from a variety of backgrounds and points of view. On top of that, Startup Weekenders receive invaluable one-on-one time with the movers and shakers within the community (like QLers Jessica, David and Bob!) as many local tech and startup leaders take part in Startup Weekends as coaches and judges.

It’s important to remember that it’s not just about the idea – it’s about the team. Startup Weekend attracts each community’s best makers and do-ers, and by spending a weekend working to build scalable companies that solve real-world problems, the participants build long-lasting relationships and may even walk away with a job or an investor. Quite possibly the most valuable aspect is that not only will participants be integrating with their local community, but they will be joining a global community of over 100,000 Startup Weekend alumni with a common mission: to change the world.

Quick Left is proud to support the event and looks forward to seeing results from the weekend.

Still not convinced? This page has some great reasons on why you should attend.

Giving Back: the Boulder Civic Hackfest

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0000

I'm very proud to be a member of a company and community that gives me the opportunity to collaborate with a competitor, a startup in alpha, and a soon-to-be-public-technology-company. Quick Left is teaming up with dojo4, Adventure, and Rally Software to organize the Boulder Civic Hackfest 6/1 and 6/2. Let's give back to the community together, shall we?

The Boulder Civic Hackfest is being organized in conjunction with the National Day of Civic Hacking, an effort taking place in cities all across the country. We'll be bringing together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs to build open source software in a short weekend of fun and fulfillment.

We welcome all comers. If you have a problem you think we can solve or if you think you can help solve problems with open data and technology, we want you there:

Subject matter experts: people working for the civic good, open data providers, data scientists, etc.
Designers: don't leave this in the hands of developers!
Developers: don't worry if you don't have experience working with open data - if you can code (or are learning) we'll see you there!

We're throwing this shindig at HUB Boulder, home to people who are looking to make change happen. That's us, at least for the weekend.

Please register so that we can ensure that we've got space, wi-fi, and nourishment ready for you!

Dispatches from Class: Performance-Tuning Your Code

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Welcome to Dispatches from Class, a blog series where I attempt to connect the theory I'm learning in my computer science classes with web development.

As software engineers, we try to squeeze out as much performance and efficiency from our code as possible. I've been learning how processors actually execute machine code, and have learned some surprising lessons that were not apparent from reading normal source code. Here I'll detail two ways you can speed up code snippets you probably use every day.

In my code examples you'll see calls to console.time(). I use this profiler (built in to all modern browsers) to come up with the result times throughout this post.

Use a local variable when looping over objects

Objects are fun and easy to use in JavaScript, but like any non-primitive data structure, you pay a cost when accessing them. The following (slow) example loops over an object 10000 times, incrementing key3 by 1 each iteration:

Each time the loop is run, you have to reach all the way into memory to get key3, bring it to the CPU to operate on it, then stick it back in memory. Accessing data stored in memory is slow, and accessing data stored in memory 10000 times is just painful.

To speed this up, store the value of key3 in a local variable before your loop. After you're done looping, simply overwrite the key3 value with your temp variable. Doing this allows your CPU to use a super-fast register file while looping, avoiding any fetching or writing to memory. In other words, instead of accessing memory 10000 times, you access it twice (once before the loop and once after):

This code does the exact same thing as the first example, but it completes it in half the time. Tl;dr: avoid using objects or other non-primitive data structures in loops. Do all the work with a local variable and copy that value to your object after the loop.

Result:
non-local: 0.280 ms
local: 0.106 ms

When iterating through data, keep memory references sequential

Most data structures store their information sequentially, so an array of [1,2,3] will store the value 1 in memory, then store the value 2 right next to it, and so on. Because CPUs cache data that is physically near data you previously accessed, you can get major speed gains by tweaking your code to use memory sequentially. For example, take this code snippet that creates and instantiates a class with two member arrays. We want a sum of the values from the two arrays, so our first (slow) example will use a simple loop:

The problem here is that we're accessing my_instance.array_one and then immediately jumping to access my_instance.array_two (in the loop). Because the two arrays are separate and live in physically distinct spaces in memory, the CPU has to jump around to access those values.

To fix this, let's only access one of the member arrays in a loop. This will allow the processor to take drastically smaller jumps when accessing data, and it will enable it to use better caching:

If you look closely, you'll see a way to integrate the first strategy into this example as well.

Result:
slow array: 0.139 ms
fast array: 0.071 ms

Looking at the results for both tests, you can see that our optimized versions are much faster. Implementing those simple tweaks can greatly increase the speed of your code. Happy fine-tuning!

The 2013 WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Decentralization, Accountability, Transparency, Reflection + Evaluation. These are some of the ten principles of a Democratic Organization that Quick Left embodies. We are excited to announce that for the second year in a row, we've made the 2013 WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces. This list of companies from all over the world and from all types of industries is compiled based on direct feedback and data from employees. We are excited to be on the list again this year, because I truly believe that we are one of the best places to work. Happiness in the workplace has always been something I've been passionate about, and creating a profitable business that allows people to thrive and be creative is important to all of us here.

The folks at WorldBlu asked me about one of Quick Left's challenges of 2012. I would say that the transition away from a purely flat organization, while still keeping true to our democratic principles, was one of the biggest challenges we faced. As I've always said, structure, predictability and organization don't need to imply hierarchy, but adding structure to an organization can be confused with taking away freedoms.

The first part of that challenge is recognizing that we needed to take a critical look at the way we structured the organization's leadership and responsibilities. In our flat structure, we were finding areas of inefficiency as well as other areas where strong leaders weren't quite sure how or when they should step in and take the reigns without derailing their existing duties. We identified areas where we could make change and add clarity.

The next step to those set of challenges was the decision of whether to hire outside people with more experience with leadership, or to promote leaders from within. We have a pretty young team -- would it be wise to allow enthusiastic, but inexperienced team members a chance at leadership? In the end, we decided that we had all the right ingredients in house and all we needed was a bit of clarity, restructuring, and of course mentorship.

Just like agile engineering process, we'll continue to iterate and tailor the process to fit our needs. We're still working on getting organized and feeling out our new roles. But, the outcome has been truly positive as we work together to continue to make Quick Left one of the best places to work in the world!

On that note, I'll also be speaking at WorldBlu Live this May. I look forward to connecting with other people that are striving for democracy in the workplace. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss strategies for building a democratic work place at your organization!

Virtual Rube Goldberg Machines....and YOLO?

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Over 100 Boulder and Denver software developers kicked off our Rube Goldberg Hackfest, but only four teams survived to present their machines in the end. Who knew devs were so interested in YOLO tweets (which were a recurring theme for the evening)?

The 'Rude Goldbergs' took the victory with a non-YOLO tweet, then a phone call, which in turn vibrated a pebble watch, triggering it to fall into a bowl with a kickstand, where the kickstand hit the return key, and the return key started playing a video of "That's All Folks!" And just like the last Hackfest, our winning team came together the night of the event.

Again thank you to our sponsors Gnip, KST, ATOMS, and MobiPlug. Your presence and toys were much appreciated!

If you missed this Hackfest, we'll let it slide and give you ample time to get ready to kick off Boulder Startup Week on May 14 with our next one: Bikes & Bytes National Bike Month Hackfest. We'll also give away a set of Ignite Boulder tickets, too.

The Power of the Product Owner

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Quick Left's Managing Director, Bing Chou, wrote about the difficulties of finding a Technical Co-Founder.

Finding the right co-founding team is a difficult task for the entrepreneur. While there are community driven events to help folks meet each other, finding someone highly technical who is willing to start a company with you is going to be difficult, no matter what. This becomes even more difficult if you are bootstrapping, because technical people who are capable of handling a founder role can command a good salary these days.

One problem with starting a company with someone just because they are technical is that writing code may be the only skill they bring to the table. These technical folks may end up being ill-equipped to handle the demands of running a company or shifting with the changing demands that come up as the company grows. Further, there's no such thing as a "Webmaster" anymore. The technology stack is broad and complex, and having what I call the "lone wolf" programmer with no one to collaborate with can lead to technical disappointment and poor execution.

How are small startups and companies coping with this dilemma? One trend I'm seeing more often is the integration of the strong Product Owner with relevant technical product experience rather than the Technical Co-Founder in the early stages of a company. My definition of a strong Product Owner in this context is someone who has experience building a technical product, whether it be at a startup or agency. They could even have experience in technical project management, but the key ingredient is that whether the development team is internal or external, this person understands how to communicate goals and focus to the engineering team and keep the product roadmap on track.

Consider some of the tasks at hand for a couple of startup co-founders--raising money, acquiring customers, building a product, not getting distracted (not necessarily in that order). A strong Product Owner is someone who can keep the product vision moving forward and on track, while the founding team is raising money, etc. For most consumer products, the technology itself is not so difficult that it requires a CTO to succeed in the early stages, giving the company some runway to get to a place where they might be able to attract the right technical lead.

The Product Owner doesn't get bogged down by the shiny technical implementation objects or distractions, but can keep the essence of the product moving forward. Whether the execution of the technical build is done with an internal team, external team or both, the product owner can keep focused on the vision.

Guest Blog Recap: Learning Ruby on Rails at RailsBridge

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Quick Left hosted the RailsBridge workshop, along with the organization of the event by Thoughtbot's Desi McAdam, earlier this month. We asked some participants to let us know their thoughts on the event and Katie and Paul of 23rd Studios graciously volunteered to share their experiences below. Not only that, they took amazing photos of the event. And yes, that's me giving a speech in a bike helmet.

Hi there, we’re Katie Falkenberg and Paul Talbot, co-owners of 23rd Studios. We just attended the most recent RailsBridge at Quick Left in Boulder and had a blast!

Paul has always been interested in learning new things and has been taken with code ever since he was a youngster. He mostly does photography and video, but Katie does a lot of web work, though mostly on the design end, and when the chance came up to attend the RailsBridge workshop, we both jumped at the chance.

For Paul, his fascination with code started when he began attending a MAGNET school in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, where he learned DOS on something that resembled a terminal, back when Macs were just gray boxes and Oregon Trail was a hot, new innovation.

Katie was dragged kicking and screaming into the tech world after graduating from art school, realizing that the economy had just crashed and no one in Atlanta, GA wanted to hire an illustrator. She took a job at Georgia Public Broadcasting…on the web team. Things finally clicked for her when she got a hold of CSS and saw the aesthetic capabilities of code. Now she’s on a mission.

Lets get back on topic here…

So we’re brand new to Boulder, we just moved here from Brooklyn (Katie) and Connecticut (Paul) and have been making a concerted effort to get out in the community and figure out what this town is all about. Katie found the group Women Who Code, which led her to Devchix, which led her to RailsBridge. Since there is a “males allowed as a guest of an attending female” policy for RailsBridge, we decided to go together.

RailsBridge was started by two women in San Francisco: Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen, affectionately known as “The Sarahs”. They had the idea to make writing code, specifically Ruby on Rails, more accessible to women. They were disheartened by what they had seen in the tech community and at conferences, large gatherings of men and a striking lack of women. Thus RailsBridge was born, a two-day, two-part crash course in setting up and writing Ruby on Rails with the objective to build a quick and easy web app. Something people could get excited about.

The workshop started on Friday night with an “installfest”. We were graciously provided pizza and beer (hooray!) along with the use of the amazing space at Quick Left. We were both amazed at how long it took to install all the tools needed to set up for Ruby and Rails, but it was straightforward enough. Since Katie uses a Mac and Paul uses a PC, and it turns out that most people who write code, especially Ruby, use Mac, that meant Paul had to get a lot of special attention, but it wasn’t a problem for the super hero TA team.

On of our favorite parts of the RailsBridge workshop was the organizer/facilitator, Desi McAdam. She’s the mastermind behind Devchix and a superstar developer for Thoughtbot. If you want to meet the hardest working woman in town, that would be her. She has a remarkable passion for Ruby and getting women involved in tech. So here we are bright and early the next day, Saturday morning…I mean, a late night of installs on Friday and then an early Saturday morning start to writing code? Sounds like the nerdiest fun ever, right? We would have been there even if we weren’t being bribed with Illegal Pete’s for lunch.

We started the morning off with hot coffee and bagels (and for some: last night’s beer and cold pizza) and then broke up into pre-determined groups based on our level of experience. Katie was grateful to be at the beginner’s table since she had never even used the terminal before. Our group was assigned 3 TAs. They were sent from heaven, and we put them to good use. Seven hours of coding and one functional Ruby web app later, we both left with our heads spinning. All in all: success!
So what did we learn?

Using a terminal makes you feel like you have super powers.
RailsBridge leaves you hungry for more.
All the class material is online! You can go back through the workshop at your own rate any time your heart desires.
The more you code, the more you learn. Tech people love pizza and beer.
Science = magic.
The Boulder tech community is incredibly supportive and gracious.
CamelCase vs. snake_case
Illegal Pete’s is delicious.
Learning Ruby on Rails is the next cool thing on our checklist.

Link to photos from workshop : http://www.23rdstudios.com/portfolio/ruby-on-rails-railsbridge-workshop/

ZingProject Launch Party

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

(Here's pics from the launch party!)

Quick Left is partnering with ZingProject to host their launch party March 13. We asked Anthony Hildoer, CTO + Co-founder of ZingProject, to tell us a bit more about the project management software.

We’re ZingProject and we’re hosting our official launch party with the awesome folks at Quick Left on 3/13/13 from 6pm - 9pm. We think you should be there, and we know you’ll have a good time. What is Zing? Find out at the launch party March 13.

The business world is changing. More clients, more projects, and thanks to technology we can do it quickly. But there is a huge issue with the current softwares out there, everyone can see everything. So if you’re managing multiple clients, you need multiple accounts. Not exactly enjoyable. We solved that problem, collaboration is a cornerstone of our software.

ZingProject is built in a way that allows you to manage multiple accounts, clients, freelance work, gigs, you name it. Our network system allows you to build as many unique pods of collaborators as you can dream up. (Our Marketing Director has 6 clients on her dashboard, including us!)

There is a subtlety here which may not be obvious: we don’t use the term “account”, or “adding users”. ZingProject is more social, and each person owns their own user. A user is an ‘account’ all by itself, and its free. Forever.

So what does that mean for you? Well, your day job can invite you to their network to collaborate on the new web design project. You can invite your family into a network to organize the big family reunion. And that side volunteer gig you picked up via Catchafire? You can have a network for that too. When you log in, you’ll see all of this in one place.

Since everyone can add anyone as a collaborator, you can collaborate seamlessly and endlessly with other ZingProject users. And best of all, you can do all this and only log in once.

The great thing about being new is we have time. Time to get to know you, and time to build ZingProject into the best system out there. We’re sticking around, we promise. Heck, we’re already gaining traction in a super saturated market, we think that is a good sign.

So come on, give us a try. We’re sure you’ll like what you see. If you don’t or if you feel as if something is missing use the feedback button to tell us about it. We will do our best to make it right. We’re like that.

Heroku's Waza Conference: Art and Technique

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Waza is the Japanese word for art and technique. After attending Heroku's second ever developer conference, I can vouch that it is appropriately named.

Immediately upon walking into the conference, there were people playing traditional Japanese music. They made sure that their signature purple was a large theme (by even bringing their own carpets to lay down) and lanterns were hung everywhere. Even the coffee they served from Blue Bottle Coffee was thoughtfully crafted one cup at a time - Heroku thought long and hard about the craftsmanship that went into each of the elements of their conference.

The conference kicked off with a Japanese drum performance and evolved into a woman painting Kanji for Waza onto a large tarp that was then raised into the air. And that was just the start.

A Developer Gathering

Waza was a four track conference - Bonsai, Bamboo, Blossom and Garden. The first 3 were talks, and the last was an Arduino track. Before everyone broke off from the main hall (the Bonsai track), the first talk (besides the opening remarks) was a talk on Stables and Volatiles by Michael Lopp. This was a fascinating talk on something I had witnessed about types of engineers, but had never pin-pointed the differences.

In his talk he brought up two groups of engineers: Stables and Volatiles. Stables are calm, reliable, predictable and create process. Volatiles, on the other hand, have issues with authority, are not very reliable, are infatuated by risk, and are strategy definers. Bad news: they hate each other. More bad news: both are needed in order to create a great company.

It was really interesting for him to show the differences in companies that rid their workplace of volatiles, and on the other hand what happens when a Volatile ends up trying to create without any Stables. If you want to read more about Michael's ideas on this subject, he has a writeup here. He left us on one final thought before he left the stage: Do you or do you not want flying toasters? I swear it made sense at the time.

After grabbing lunch, Aaron Patterson was next up in the Bonsai track. Aaron's talk was called Unfactoring, and it detailed steps on calmly and collectively getting yourself out of a meta-programming nightmare. He also told us about his 10 new startups he's creating, including "Technical Co-founding as a Service." I saw no reason why this shouldn't go well.

Some other notable talks I saw were Rune Madsen's talk on heavily mixing code to determine your design outcomes, Steve Klabinik's talk on relating how what we've learned from philosophy has played a direct role on Object Oriented Programming (done on an overhead projector no less), Jacob Kalplan-Moss's talk relating his experience with creating Django and cultivating the ecosystem around it, as well as Yukihiro Matsumoto's talk on Ruby 2.0 (and getting to meet him wasn't bad either).

A Day of Craft and Code

A unique thing about this conference was bringing in crafts. When I first heard about this I was skeptical, but after hearing Oren Teich's opening remarks on collaboration and the spirit of craftsmanship, I was willing to give it a go. Having a creative outlet was a great way to meet other like-minded developers, and working with your hands to produce something tangible was a nice way to break up the day. What's a technical conference without Arduino hacking and book binding anyway?

All in all I'd call this conference a smashing success. Thanks to Heroku and all of the sponsors that made it happen. If you're a developer considering going to this conference, let me be the first to encourage you to attend. Feel free to comment or tweet at me with any questions about the conference or any thoughts you had!

jQuery Toronto Lessons Learned: Finding Performance in Your Dev Tools

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Recently, Alex McPherson and I spoke at jQuery Toronto. The conference was well organized and full of excellent content. This is a quick wrap-up of our experiences in the great white north and how I learned to make my slide deck perform better!

The State of jQuery is Strong!

The conference kicked off with a keynote by Dave Methvin on the state of jQuery. There has been considerable effort by the jQuery team to take some pretty big steps in recent months; specifically, version 1.9 established a line in the sand for many long-deprecated portions of the jQuery API, and a plans to drop support for older browsers in version 2.0 were put into motion. Two things stand out for me about Dave's talk: first, despite all of the outward communication surrounding the plans to finally remove deprecated code from 1.9 (and making an excellent compatibility plugin to help folks with the upgrade), many users were caught off-guard by the changes and said so on the jQuery bug tracker; secondly, he cited a statistic that Google search queries for "jquery" have finally surpassed those for "javascript."

I found both of these revelations surprising, but both make sense, in a way. Many developers are being introduced to jQuery prior to learning JavaScript (or at least needing to use it for anything significant.) This means that beginners might not understand why hot-linking to the latest build of jQuery isn't a very good idea since there may be breaking changes some day. Fortunately, one of the best developments to come out of [jQuery's recent refactor and open-sourcing of all of the jQuery websites was the creation of the jQuery Learning Center, which includes editable, open source documentation for learning the basics of JavaScript and jQuery. Consequently, the details of this process were deftly covered by jQuery Core team member Adam Sontag during the conference.

Chasing Down Performance Bottlenecks

Addy Osmani and Paul Irish from Google stepped up to the plate to deliver closing keynotes on the first and second day of the conference. Both of them covered similar content: how you can use the Chrome Developer tools to improve your productivity as developer and the overall user experience of what you're developing. This isn't the first time the notion of caring about your browser's framerate has come up, but it is probably the first time that it's been given an in depth explication in front of 500 jQuery developers.

On day one, Addy Osmani led the audience through a comprehensive walkthrough of what framerate is and why it matters to front end developers. By performing a handful of optimizations through the Chrome Developers tools, he was able to make visible improvements Pintrest's scrolling and rendering performance. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading his post on how to create a development workflow around the Chrome Developer tools timeline and profiles. It's great to see more tooling and evangelism coming out of the woodwork on this topic, which was previously the exclusive domain of browser vendors and black magic to everyone else—gone are the days of having to rely on your wits and visual acuity to make a complex or image-heavy page have silky-smooth scrolling and rendering performance.

Paul's talk was more of grab-bag of new front end awesomeness, but he also demo'ed what's possible with the latest version of Chrome Canary and a little bit of in browser magic to suss-out slow repaints and get to the bottom of potential rendering bottlenecks. He mentioned that much of what he and Addy were discussing are also now in the new Chrome Developers Documentation site, which is probably the best start-point for you if you're want to get more out of the tools you're probably already using.

Applying Optimizations

The best part of all this is that I found a way to make it specifically relevant to the content in my talk, "Fixing Broken Windows: 10 small things that will instantly improve your project." Being an avid fan of animated GIFs, I accordingly made a presentation that had lots of animation, both in the DOM and of the GIF variety. Because of this, my deck was a touch slow when animating between pages, especially with large background images. On the flight back, I decided to see how much I could do to make it perform a little bit better, using the some of the techniques that Addy and Paul talked about. So I fired up a session of Chrome Canary and was off to the races.

I started by using the Timeline panel to determine what my framerate was when my deck was acting slow and how that related to both script execution, rendering and layout performance. I noticed that a lot of costly rendering operations were being triggered by JavaScript. Some of these were unavoidable, but it did show me a few places that I could simplify the JavaScript call stack by moving away from synchronous events in favor of direct method calling for a minor improvement. But there was still a lot of jittering during transitions between slides, so I started to dig a little bit deeper.

Next, I tried using a technique to force Chrome into rendering certain things in differently layers with GPU acceleration. By applying a null transform in css, the browser will treat those items differently and handle rendering in a separate thread on the GPU. The code change was pretty simple:

article img[src*="gif"] {
  -webkit-transform: translateZ(0);
}

And the results were astounding! Nearly all of the jittery-ness and jank (a technical term for ugly scrolling or framerate, covered in Addy's slides) went away, and my framerate skyrocketed. By forcing animated GIFs to render separately from the rest of the content in my slides, additional CPU cycles were free to handle the JavaScript and rendering going on during slide transitions. Applied knowledge FTW!

But there is one big caveat here, which Addy covered today in a post on Google Plus: this is by no means a universal solvent, and like most other things on the front-end, there's a point at which it can start to negatively impact performance.

Conference Wrap Up

Both Alex and I were thrilled to participate in the first ever jQuery Conference in Toronto. The content of our talks focused on what you can do to better organize and manage your applications, and how you can emphasize long term quality by getting rid of minor erosions in your development workflow. We each had a lot of good questions after our talks, in person and on Twitter. There were 31 excellent speakers that covered a wide range of topics that are relevant to jQuery Developers, which, as Dave Methvin pointed out, are quite a large group. 55% of the top ranked 10,000 websites currently use jQuery.

We had a great time and hope to make it back in to Canada for more poutine soon!

Scott Vinkle, an attendee, has compiled an almost comprehensive list of speaker's slide decks.

And a big thanks to Darcy Clarke and the other organizers for giving us such a warm welcome and putting on a fantastic conference!

An Evening with Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor at Quick Left - April 25

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Join us in welcoming Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor to Quick Left on Thursday, April 25 at 6:30 for a presentation of their new book: The Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. Everyone who attends gets a free book! Stop by for an evening of networking, authors' presentation, Q&A and book signing.

This is a free, community event, but please register in advance, space is limited.

Doors open at 6:30
Networking Happy Hour from 6:30-7:00
Presentation followed by Q&A 7:00-7:45
Book Signing 8:00

Thank you to our sponsors Silicon Valley Bank, KKO Law Firm, and Kurtz Fargo for supporting this event. They will be in attendance to answer any questions you may have regarding your startup or established business.

**The Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving a Relationship with an Entrepreneur **
Entrepreneurs are always on the go, looking for the next startup challenge. And while they lead very intensely rewarding lives, time is always short and relationships are often long-distance and stressed because of extended periods apart. Coping with these, and other obstacles, are critical if an entrepreneur and their partner intend on staying together--and staying happy.

In Startup Life, Brad Feld--a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist--shares his own personal experiences with his wife Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his twenty years of experience in this field to address how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.
Includes real-life examples of entrepreneurial couples who have had successful relationships and what works for them.

Again, a big think you to our co-sponsors:

Silicon Valley Bank, the premier bank for technology, life science, cleantech, venture capital, private equity and premium wine businesses. www.svb.com

Kendall, Koenig & Oelsner (KKO) is a corporate transactional and business law boutique that represents businesses, financial institutions, private equity funds, investors and individuals in a broad range of sophisticated transactional matters. KKO is a trusted advisor to our clients, including as outside general counsel for many businesses. www.kkofirm.com

Kurtz Fargo LLP, a boutique accounting firm based in Boulder, CO. The Firm provides high quality assurance, tax and advisory services to emerging growth, small and mid-sized businesses. www.kurtzfargo.com

Working with an Outside Development Team

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0000

Maybe you need to beat your competitors to be first to market. Maybe you need to keep promises you've made to investors and customers (or more likely, promises your boss has made). Maybe you need to keep your product moving forward while you find the right hire. In each case, contracting an outside development team can be an effective strategy if you manage geographic distance, technical expertise, and budget smartly.

Join us for our first Quick Cast webinar March 19 if you'd like to hear lessons learned from those who have been there.

We've invited customers Jeremiah Lee, former Director of Product for Awe.sm out of San Francisco and Gabe Monroy, CTO for OpDemand here in Boulder, to share their thoughts on how to select a development partner, integrate them with your internal team, and smoothly transition away from them at the end of the engagement.