Offmessage

Today is, as all self respecting Internet junkies know, International Talk Like A Pirate Day.  The image below represents the pinnacle of our office conversation today.  I am so proud of what we’ve created.

Things have been afoot over at Isotoma land, making it almost impossible for me to actually maintain a blog. I could repost my status messages from facebook here, if you wanted? To be honest all they say is things like “Andy is very busy”, but it might give you the sense of something happening, if you fancied it?

Why so busy? We’re in the process of 4 Plone sites at the moment, one of which is distinctly massive, while also attempting to change the face of Open Source Content Management in our spare time. Watch this space and all that.

We’ve launched another customer site today… www.forster.co.uk is the new corporate site for The Forster Company, a really fascinating bunch of people who “deliver communication for social change” (PR with an ethical message to the layman). People who know me in real life will know that that’s exactly the sort of thing that presses my hippy buttons, so I’ve really enjoyed the last few months as we’ve been putting this one together. It’s Plone again (we can’t help it, honest), but the work that our friend Rob has done on the design has made it very hard to tell. All in all a rather good do.

We‘re growing. Rapidly. Finding good people is hard, particularly in our neck of the woods. We’ve been fine tuning our recruitment processes over the last 6 months as we’ve gone from first employee to 14th, but it’s always interesting to see what other people have to say, and who better than Marc Andreessen?

How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

(As an aside, Marc Andreessen is still my winning card in Business Card Top Trumps. I was lucky enough to meet him one on one during the launch of Loudcloud; I couldn’t afford his software and he knew it, so the meeting didn’t last long, but it was still a high point )

I’m going to Hack Day London, which is rather exciting. Given the number of applicants it’s rather flattering to have made it in to the chosen 500. Not that I’m feeling smug or anything. Oh no.

We are moving into new offices. They are too big (at the moment). Like the companies we took the piss out of ten/twelve years ago we thought maybe now was the time for a foosball table. And then I found this one. Only £14k, but truly awesome.

Isotoma is recruiting. If you love Python, Javascript and getting all moist about Web2.0 go and have a look at the job specs and give us a shout at enquiries@isotoma.com.

Woo hoo! Our favourite (if a little neglected right now) baby Sleevenotez has made it in at number 12 in Techscape’s list of The top 25 UK web 2.0 start ups (as also reported in The Register). Thanks guys. That’s fair made our week!

I’ve been muttering previously about geocoding in the UK. It sucks. Everything is under heavy (and expensive) license restrictions and the Open Source alternatives are a long way from getting there. Luckily the latest job we‘re working on is an Australian Google Maps mashup (map my adventure, soft launched last week)…

One of the things that we’ve been asked to do is tie points on the map to the State that they’re in. Doug and I had been worrying about this for some time, as we thought that we would end up manually building polygons to represent state boundaries from a map ourselves. But no. Of course, we live in the UK and think that all map data is sacred. In Australia, and a lot of other countries too, the data is freely available and provided by the Government. You can download it yourselves too if you want.

As Doug was talking about only today, we are currently pulling very hard into new territory on the planning and architecture front as the projects that we work on get bigger.

We’ve come to rely on a few tools along the way, and they’re a strange set. We started out using video cameras a lot to record planning sessions. Our goal was to find the least intrusive way of capturing everything. Ultimately though, all it left us with was a whole bucket of video tape and little way to really catalogue and review it. Instead, over the last 6 months we’ve settled on a much simpler set of tools:

• A whiteboard
• More index cards of various colours than you can imagine
• A1 flipcharts
• Camera phones (for taking pictures of the flip charts and white board)
• EasyPrototype for turning photos into interactive click throughs

Our new found rapid ability to turn the flip chart scribbling into interactive prototypes led me to thinking about the old facilitators’ trick of covering the walls with huge sheets of paper for maximum doodling capacity. And then I saw PixelNotes. Pretty, and functional. Not sure Doug will let me do that to the office though.