A new commercial for T-Mobile myTouch 3G features an Android application made by Sibers.
The app is called Face-IT and it turns your Android device into a mouth that moves according to what you pronounce.
Archive for the 'Links' Category
T-Mobile Ad Features Sibers Android App
October 30, 2009Review of Web Design in Russia
October 17, 2009
Smashingmagazine.com, which is an endless source of information and inspiration for Web people, has just published a sophisticated article about what Web design in Russia looks like. Smashing Magazine has chosen Russia to be the first in the series of “Global Web Design” and there really must be a reason for it!
The article is everything you ever wanted to learn about Russian Web design. It’s a bit of history and a lot about current state of things. It’s an interview with two Russian Web designers, describing life of Russian Web developer and telling you about differences between Russian and Western designs. It’s a showcase of creative agencies and freelancers (and I am sure they will get tons of work after this review!). And then, there is a huge list of Russian Web designs.
And… comments did impress me! Works of Russian Web designers got amazing feedback although some said they could not even think of Web design in Russia before!
Does outsourcing suck?
August 14, 2008No, we just couldn’t pass this article by. First, I thought publishing it in full here, but you better read its original with all its comments. It’s worth it if you’re into outsourcing or offshoring. Author is an Indian programmer.
Here it is: http://www.diovo.com/2008/08/why-outsourcing-sucks/
How to Work with Russians
April 2, 2007By Alex Polezhaev
Just have found an amusing article on the Internet – Negotiating with Russians. While controversial at different points, it is a great source for any from the Western World to understand those savage Russians.
Some excerpts from the article:
Often it is impossible for a Russian to give you a specific date by which a deliverable will be ready—this does not mean he thinks it’s unimportant or he is not prepared to deliver. He is bound by constraints beyond his control.
Russians do not like surprises. If you put a new idea or proposal on the table, do not put Russians on the spot by asking what they think of it or expecting an immediate answer to it. Try floating new ideas informally first.
Face-saving is important to Russians, so choose your battles wisely. Decide which issues are worth making a fuss over.
"Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development" by HireRussians
January 10, 2007Written by Sibers CEO Serge Markov
Martin Fowler, “author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development” described his experience with offshore development and using agile practices, which we apply in most our projects, as follows:
“For the last four years ThoughtWorks has operated a lab in Bangalore India to support our software development projects in North America and Europe. Traditional approaches to offshore development are based on plan-driven methodologies, but we are very firmly in the agile camp. Here I discuss our experiences and lessons learned in doing offshore agile development. So far we’ve discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate.” (see the article)
Let me express my opinion about practices he described
When development force is involved on both parts, we propose to use one repository for code base – and make daily builds. Unfortunately, some day one side can discover very large changes there (like we found getting back to work a few days ago). Getting small and manageable updates is vital!
We haven’t used much this practice here in Sibers, but at one my previous jobs (for CFT Inc) it worked nicely: we spent several weeks to get things resolved remotely and then found a solution by sending a small team to the customer site. Communicating face to face with several stakeholders we could find the solution in terms of hours.
We always welcome our prospective or current customers at our headquarters here, in Russia. If it causes some trouble to get a Russian visa, it’s possible to meet with us in a visa-free country (like Turkey or Kyrgyzstan, where we have our partner company KG United).
Culture really matters! Fortunately, Russian world is much closer to the Western one than the latter to that of India or other Asian countries. At least you won’t face a culture shock with us.
We do extensively use WiKi’s for our internal KnowledgeBase, and several our projects also use this practice, which proved to be quite efficient. Suppose we need to make it permanent in all the projects.
Our QA team has great abilities to automate acceptance testing via tools, but also for several large projects the development team creates a big set of test-units written by themselves just to cover all possible behaviors of the application.
I do appreciate this practice very much. In 20% of projects we make daily builds, in 60% we make builds or provide online demo 2-3 times per week (but still send daily email updates and do chat with customers). It really works!
Usually this practice is applied through daily chats via IM – ICQ, AOL, MSN, Google Talk, Skype or any other preferable to the customer way.
Depending on the project size, our iteration varies from a day to week.
Every our project starts with an “architecture” meeting where the whole team is involved: CTO (who made the estimate), Sales Manager (who led a preliminary discussion with the customer), Project Manager, Senior Developer or Team Leader (with clue on technology to be used), Developer and QA Engineer (to ensure quality questions resolved from the start).
We make a lot of projects with existing code, and “a few changes” very often transform into large development as we begin with fixing existing bugs.
In several large projects we found that it’s better to get a whole team involved into the whole architectural part – both with analysis, design, development and QA. In such a way the team understands the whole concept of the project and works more efficiently.
Agree! At least one practice describes this rule: when our sale process is finished, we do require Sales Manager to prepare a Work Statement document with all known details about the project described. This document is the base for work on the project and a good example that things should be written down.
Our PMs do use several methods described bellow. Probably it’s kind of duplicating information, but it’s necessary when you cannot “look into your customer’s eyes”:
- Oral – we have 1-800 number and conference calls software based on Asterisk and VOIP technologies
- Quick chats – IM’s as described
- Email – daily updates, reports, financial information
- Bug-tracking – bugzilla, Mantisse or whatever preferred by customers
So sum it up:
- In most cases HireRussians and Sibers follow these practices, which are of course not “rocket-science” but the essence of everyday software development experience.
Visual matters
January 9, 2007For all of us trying to have their chakras balanced, minds organized and presentations visualized – a great resource:
A periodic table of visualization methods – what can be more brilliant?!
Link
October 11, 200670 bucks per click
September 12, 2006List of the most expensive Google adwords. Whew! Nothing related to programming or outsourcing!
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