Big Bang Technology

Everyone knows that practicing pair programming and agile development are the best ways to produce high quality software as fast as possible. But setting these pairs up is a lot harder than it looks. Here’s how we do it. How can we improve?

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Most people don’t know what their career will be when they are in high school, and I was no different. Now that I’m a young adult, I’m ready to graduate from university and kick-start my career as a professional programmer next May.

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My name is Joonha Shin, a co-op student from University of Waterloo, and I’ve been working at Big Bang Technology for just under two months.

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My name is Joonha Shin, a co-op student from University of Waterloo, and I chose to work at a startup. Here’s why.

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Understanding your team's future goals makes your business better.

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It’s easy: Walk down the street to the next startup, find someone awesome, and offer them something better than they already have.

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Customer Development comes along and tells us, “Go get your customers before you have a product.” OK, I get the strategy - I bought into Customer Development a long time ago. But when it comes down to the tactics, and you’re staring down your mailchimp list, you know it’s harder than it looks. You know it is.

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Here’s my point: Products are not babies - you shouldn’t feel bad about abandoning them if they’re ugly.

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There are no heroes at our office. When the clock strikes five, the team goes home. If they try to keep working, I tell them that the game’s over and they lost. They either put too much on their plate, got taken off-task, or were wasting time. None of those justify working past five, on a holiday, or over a weekend. The only exception we make is for the founders, and it should be obvious why that’s the case.

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Do you remember what happened last night? Didn't think so. We're going to help you fix that with a simple iPhone app.

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Shit happens. It’s unavoidable. The real magic happens when and how we respond.

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We're really proud to announce our first acquisition ever. We hope to add more companies to our portfolio as soon as possible.

UPDATE: http://www.jetcooper.com/blog/deal-falls-apart/ APRIL FOOLS!

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As most of you probably don't know, Retrievr is an idea for a service that fosters relationships between artisanal coffee shops and their customers by combining a social check-in service with a simple feedback mechanism. We came up with it when we attended Lean Startup Machine a few weeks ago.

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Let’s actually dooo.sh/it.

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When Big Bang Technology started out two and a half years ago, it was just Max and Cam. But in the last year, the growth of the company has created new challenges and opportunities for us to develop a company culture that supports everyone at Big Bang. Armed with that mandate, Big Bang set off to create a company health plan that would not only keep all of us healthy, but also address our individual needs.

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It’s hard to launch a startup alone, but it’s even harder to find a co-founder to start it with. I’ve taken some lessons from the real world and I want to know: If you were looking for your perfect match, would you go to startup speed dating?

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Since Big Bang Technology’s inception almost three years ago, we have been forced to learn a lot about business. Max and Cameron have done a lot to make Big Bang a great place to work. As the company started to grow, we wanted to take ownership of our employer responsibilities, and take a bigger role in looking after our team. With Chris's one-year anniversary looming, and the staff growing at a steady rate, it became increasingly clear that we needed to put some basic human resource infrastructure into place.

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Imagine us, deciding to start a software company, without any experience, resources, or a golden idea. I told this story at LeanCoffeeTO a few weeks back, and since it was well-received, I'd like to share it with you here.

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Chris Mudiappahpillai has been with Big Bang Technology for one year. Because I love Chris and the contributions that he has brought to our team I wanted to do the right thing and give him a proper performance evaluation. As his anniversary was approaching I began to reach out to our advisors and research how we should be assessing his performance. I saw that there were a million processes and procedures for evaluating an employee and it got messy. I decided to get back to the basics and form the basis of his evaluation upon a single question: How does Chris know he is succeeding each day?

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Writing good bug descriptions isn't easy, and developers love to bitch about bogus bug reports. But really, it's our job to help people report them better. How's a civilian supposed to know that sometimes we think in lists, and not in stories? We work with a distributed team, so they can't just sit down next to us and walk through it. When they find bugs, it's our job to hunt them down and squash them with impunity. I wrote this letter to our team-members to help me reproduce bugs without lengthy skype conversations or tons of email. This isn't for customer consumption, but rather for our internal team. I figure we owe it to them to help them write better bug descriptions.

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I once read that building software is like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down. It stuck with me immediately. It's my stock answer for when someone asks me what I do for a living. I use it because I love the idea. It's funny, and it speaks to the creativity and pressure involved in our field.

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Creative Exploitation and Speculative Work in the Context of the Client-Vendor Relationship

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How to lose a win-win situation.

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We don't want to be Microsoft, and we sure as hell don't want to be Facebook. We want to be the guys that you can talk to, the guys who are quietly creating excellent software for the long tail, and doing it our own way.

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Who knew an application this simple could affect us so much. This is my review of Mockups by Balsamiq.

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Two guys, one laptop, and 4636 kilometres of pure Canadian coding. This is the Cross Country Coding Tour 09.

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Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. A lot of people want angel financing, but it always comes with strings attached. Here's the story of how we came to an understanding with our investor using basic, high-level ground rules as a starting point for negotiations.

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A few thoughts on creating a technology start-up, from a guy who understands that it takes discipline and humility to serve and nurture your company into maturity.

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Here are four questions that have been agitating me lately. They're not meant to be insurmountably philosophical or life-changing. They're more like nerd pick-up lines. Some have said that four is an arbitrary number, and it is. I feel however, that an even five would fit no better. Hopefully they'll put your craft into perspective and show you how many more questions we have yet to answer.

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Will we eat the red one and go for a ride, or the blue one and forget we had the chance?

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A craftsperson is only as good as the tools she uses. And since we, as independent web developers, consider ourselves to be craftspeople, the same statement applies to us. In fact, as web developers, we build tools ourselves. Take a peek at what's in my toolbox.

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As an experiment, we decided to start doing lots of really small experiments, so Big Bang could slowly grow into the kick-ass company we see ourselves being in the future. Many failures, and a few successes later, we're still committed to our radical pursuit of improvement.

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We're sick and tired of hack developers ripping off naive clients. And while I'm completely disgusted by some of the horror-stories I've heard lately, clients keep asking the wrong questions. As real developers, it's our responsibility to make the tough decision to speak the truth. This is an example of what we call the anti-pitch, and while it might cost us a few contracts, who cares: we do things the right way.

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Honesty and communication go hand in hand when you're trying to establish a technology start-up. They're hard habits to get into, but if you can get the hang of it you're going to impress the pants off of folks. If you don't, then you're buying a one-way ticket to FML

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Salaries and Dividends, Pay scales and Evaluations; we struggled with finding a way to pay ourselves fairly as a two-partner technology start-up.

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Inspired by recent conversations with remarkably smart people, we've decided to step up our efforts to meet and exchange ideas with people and companies that share our values. Here is the first part of that effort.

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What does a technology company really need in a website? Not as much as you'd think.

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Yummy food prepared in and around headquarters this week.

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One nice thing about having a live/work office is we have a pretty fully stocked kitchen. We are going to start sharing some of the interesting meals we come up with for lunches.

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