Let’s talk about Tech baby
So how DOES the sausage get made here at Buzzillions?
(First of all, we AVOID as many Web 1.0 lame-isms as possible but you never know when an 800 pound Gorilla reference is going to delight the noobie who’s still sending his friends joke emails.)
Okay back to tech talk…so we go for the “best of breed” approach and generally operate on the bleeding edge. Why not choose the tried and true tech of yesteryear? Well, using the right combo of stable open source and innovative enterprise software gives us a legion of low-cost outsourced programmers. Why reinvent the wheel? (…when you can just use other people’s cliches…)
Whoever said “Work smarter not harder” clearly did NOT work at a startup.
When you’ve got to work harder AND smarter, you want the best tools at your disposal and you want to dispose of the tools that don’t cut the mustard. We buy some tools (e.g., Jira, Intellij, Endeca) and use open source for others (e.g., Hibernate, EHCache, Apache, Tomcat, Spring).
We even tested three wikis for a month until we chose the one we wanted to use (Twiki). There were several Wikis that didn’t even support attachments…weird. As for why wikis have two search boxes…well, that’s a mystery for the ages.
If you add in the individual productivity tools such as Excel, Powerpoint - does it really boost productivity :), SnagIt, Google Docs, Mind Manager and others, the list of tech becomes staggering.
Stay tuned and we here at Buzzillions will open the hood so you can learn from our mistakes and in turn share your insights with us.
Can you add to this list of Web 1.0 lame-isms?
“800 pound gorilla” - I later found out that a VERY LARGE gorilla is generally 550 pounds so if you’re the 800 pound gorilla you can really kick butt (unless you’re slow or dumb I guess)
“how the sausage gets made”- I researched this and wish I hadn’t
“dog and pony show” - many dotcom road shows were just a substantive
who’s got more of these?
3 Comments, Comment or Ping
JR
How about “paradigm shift,” “next generation,” and “best in class solution.”
Jul 1st, 2008
Malcolm - KlikDeal (Smart Affiliate Linking)
Cool, looking forward to hear more about what you learned.
Struggling with google docs at the moment so we are especially interested in hearing more about twiki. Advantages to run projects via the platform and so on.
Thanks!
Jul 2nd, 2008
Jimbo
we generally run our projects using Jira and have some common charts in Google Docs where many people are updating metrics at once. I run my brainstorming and keep track of higher level ideas in MindManager and not in Jira. The twiki is mainly for reference since it is harder to update than google docs and not as organized as Jira. So we have data that DOESN’T change that much on the Twiki. Data that changes a lot from multiple people on Google Docs. Data that is bug related or software release based is in Jira. Good items for wikis are phone lists, network diagrams, reports that are fixed in time. we tried mediawiki, twiki and some other wiki. we liked twiki since we could do tables and add attachments. We don’t really do tables in the twiki anymore though. we do that in Google Docs.
Personally, i think that the always saved, realtime aspect of Google Docs is pretty darn game changing. Just converting to the Edit page on a wiki ends up being too onerous.
Jul 2nd, 2008
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