London calling

Radio silence is over, we are live in the US, Canada, UK, Brazil and across the southern continent. We hit top 3 in the Canadian sports iOS chart in the first week and apparently top 4 in the US for a short period of time - depending on which stats you look at.

So where do I start after nearly 6 months of being undercover???

Well, for fans of NFL start with our app here... :)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/call-it-football-play-in-real/id571252780 

You'll find me playing regularly with my facebook account - so hook up if you think you can take me on!

For everyone else, rest assured the beer fridge is still stocked, the sleepless long nights are still unrelenting, the hipster lifestyle is still, well, hipster.

I promised to be honest on the ups and downs, and its not been a 100% ninja strike, with Apple taking a staggering 5-6 weeks to approve the product its reassuring to now that the corporate world is still, well, corporate, but we are happy to finally ship a product and we are learning ALOT on the complexity of building, marketing and promoting a mobile app. We are quickly burning through the NFL season so its exciting to see how the product is going to shape up, and somewhat scary knowing we can no longer change the product to get it shipped before the superbowl - but thanks Apple app reviewers for giving us all a xmas break :)

Next post I'm going to tell you a bit about our tech stack, and how its evolved and the challenges of some of the bleeding edge areas we have looked at - how it feels to be contributors and no longer consumers of open source technology!

Early Days

So we are officially squatting, sharing office space on the cheap whilst we are waiting on our move to Soho - on the plus side we have a room full of toys, colouring books, bean bags and play matts - don't ask!... my favourite toy is my spanking new macbook pro retina and thunderbolt monitor, its already feeling like a hipster games company oh plus we are looking to get a pet office dog, a sports bar and either a pool table fitted (the cheaper option) or a shuffle board (big in the US apparently) - capital HIPSTER! 

Last week we locked ourselves in a windowless hotel conference room - thrashing out a product idea with some of the most animated, energised people you'll ever meet: quote - here we'll have boom, bang, fists, stars and wham, my friends are like wooww dude, then smash the whales are feeding.

Oh man... there's soo much I can't tell you as we are in stealth mode, though all bribes gratefully received, I take cash and equity!

Cowboy's Rodeo Roundup

Out: Requirements docs / Sprint planning
In: Kanban


Out: The daily hour 'standup' conference calls
In: standups


Out (on a short vacation): Jira
In: PostIt notes

Out: Telephones and headsets
In: err, nothing



Out: Sweet trolley
In: Beer trolley

Out: Milk fridge
In: Beer Fridge - erm, there's no pattern here!

Cool Tech Tools: Confluence + gliffy

Cool Tech Frameworks: Dropwizard... shock - a framework that actually makes life easier

Quote of the week: "Don't poke the bear!"

Next post I'll feed you angry badgers with some of our unscientific tech biases, plain opinioniated but mostly ranting thoughts (some of you are probably missing my rants - right?) on our experiences with Scala, SBT (why I oughta!!!), Akka, Finagle and message bus technologies.



Recommended Reads


Steve Blank - Four Steps to Epiphany

http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf

Eric Reis - The Lean Startup

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/the-lean-startup/id467802875?mt=11

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Lean-Startup-Eric-Ries/dp/0307887898

The Interviews

So how do you interview for a company that doesn't exist? Simple... recruitment is done on past connections and recommendations, and the interviews are about sizing fit. Not so simple is trying to understand what the shape of the team should look like, and how the relationships should work within the team.

In the past couple of weeks I've been meeting the candidate engineering team, 6 folks drawn from a pool of connections that the two co-founders have previously worked with - I'm the exception as I'm outside of this circle and I'm coming in on a recommendation. I've been in an open dialogue with the co-founders for several months now, and have been providing some technical blueprints and sample app mock-ups to build up a level of trust and a working relationship.

The candidate team meet-ups are definitely a non typical 'interview' - its candidate on candidate, mostly a 1:1 basis followed by providing feedback to the co-founders. Its an interesting dynamic, both parties trying to impress on the other, limited technical assessment as the candidates are all coming from proven backgrounds and there's a large expectation for all to be able to pivot on new technologies and skills as needed to take advantage of the bleeding edge technology in the market.

Its definitely an alien recruitment process to me, personally I prefer heavy technical assessments as it plays to my strengths but this is probably the first of many cultural differences to this type of environment. What works well is that the team is getting a collective buy in and there's a build-up of energy and momentum.

Current plan is for the company to come together within the next 3 weeks, and hopefully I'll have a formal contract very shortly!

The beginning

The Drop.

In less than 3 weeks I'll have quit my job from arguably the world's top Investment Bank (if that means anything any more), dropped to a $0 salary, turned my back on one of the most challenging working environments I've ever experienced and have walked away from some of the most intelligent, friendly and co-operative teams I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

And what for?

Hopefully - I'll be joining a startup as a founding technology developer. Hopefully... but I have no guarantees - everything is on faith, the team is still forming, the product idea is but a twinkle in the eye and in 3 weeks I could be glaring at the Jeremy Kyle show (do they still show that?) and singing the blues - well more likely singing c'est la vie on a beach in the south of France - but hey, at some point reality bites.

So welcome to my blog - I plan to share this journey, no holds barred all the way to the bitter or sweet end.