Ruby on Rails Outsourcing

I figure it is much much better to just use a great third party application like Wordpress to blog, rather than trying to come up with our own blogging system.

So here it is, I’m now using Wordpress (on a different domain) to write blogs for the Kiranatama site.

By the way, the two blog previews on the Kiranatama’s home page are retrieved from the Wordpress database, by creating a WpPost model in the rails app.

This new site just needs to be skinned. We’ll get to that later, for now, at least I have a much better blogging experience

Thank you so much for those of you who have contacted us lately. We truly appreciate the interest. We are however, unfortunately, very short staffed. Seems like finding new clients is easier than hiring talented engineers!

For now we wouldnt want to hire many people at once, because we never want to lay off our engineers, even after our contracts with our clients are over.

Also, training and making sure all new engineers are up to the standard would be more difficult if we hire engineers too agressively.

That’s why we’re taking a more modest approach when hiring.  Currently our rate of head-count growth is an additional of one engineer per month.

But rest assured, we are doing the best we can to satisfy your development needs!

I’m lucky we have the Entrepreneur and Business 2.0 magazines here in Indonesia.

Those two magazines always inspire me new business ideas every time!

The problem with business ideas are, well, they are just ideas until we execute them!

The desire to create a lot of websites has always been in my heart, I just am waiting for more human resources.

Yes, we are trying to hire more talented people. In fact, we never stop placing a job ad for the last six months!

After almost a year, our office with an area of about 1100 square feet, is getting very crowded.

There are 11 people working there, and the shared internet has gotten pretty slow.

Today, we officially move to a new, much better office in south Bandung!

With an area of about 3500 square feet, nicer neighborhood, we just love this new place!
Moreover, we subscribe to two internet providers to get more bandwidth!

This new office will definitely boost our productivity and comfort for our engineers. Yay!

A client of us requires line-by-line code checking (literally), and not just code that works; it must be clean.

Their standard is very high. To match their standard (which we believe not impossible to achieve), starting today we will do regular training to each and everyone of our engineers.

Before each training, participants must read ahead the topics to be discussed. We will discuss the topics from these books first: Test Driven Development by Kent Beck, the Programming Ruby book, and Agile web development with Rails

I believe practice alone is not sufficient without strong theoretical foundation. That is why reading Rails books and beyond is VERY important.

Is indeed difficult.

Our employees are our assets. In fact, human resources are our *only* assets.

Hiring a very experienced engineer is difficult. So we resort to CREATE stellar engineer out of talented person.

As long as the person has strong academic background, has some work experience, willing to sweat and bleed, and has a strong desire to learn, we are gonna HIRE this person.

We then nurture, give rigorous training. The cutoff time is three months. If by three months, this person is still not performing as expected, he’s out. But so far, every hire is a success !

So we CREATE, not really FIND, talented people.

It means “To be cautious of other people is a must, to be wicked to other people is a must not”.

Raised in a family with strong Chinese values, I often hear these kinds of sayings since I was a little kid.

The first part of the sentence basically means that we cannot trust other people 100%, even if they are as close as old friends, relatives, siblings, or spouse.
Remember that, most crimes and frauds are committed by one of the victim’s closests.

The second part of the sentence is more important. Never ever harm other people. In my line of business:

It means to always protect intellectual property rights (source code, that is).

It means to never harm the client’s data (like executing DROP DATABASE) even if, for example, I hate the client so much for punching me in the face.

It means to deliver the task on the deadline specified even if I am to bust my ass to achieve it; because I know if I don’t, not only I will lose my business but my client may lose his business also!

Anyway, let’s all “Fang Ren Zhi Xin Bu Ke Wu, Hai Ren Zhi Xin Bu Ke You”, and the world will be a better place

I joined Elance to find new outsourcing clients several weeks ago.

There are a lot of projects posted, but unfortunately, at the same time there are too many competitors!

For one project, there could be more than 10 companies bidding on it.
Worse, because there are so many bidders, prices have gone so low that they no longer make financial sense.

If Kim and Mauborgne (authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy) look at Elance, they will say that it is a bloody red ocean.

So I quit Elance, and now currently looking for ways to get out of this red ocean and swim into the blue ocean…

When there is a will, there is a way!

I’m a hardworking man, but until recently, I never read a book except my school textbooks.

After I graduated and got into business life, I started reading business books, because I had no knowledge nor experience in doing business.

I admit it is true when people say that to be successful in business, one does not have to study business theories. Lots of people I knew, they didn’t even go to college, but they are now very successful businessmen!

But I believe this world has business schools, theories because they make better businessmen!

Anyway, I bought a marketing book titled Blog Marketing at Amazon, and that is actually what inspires me write this blog.

By writing this blog I hope to befriend new fellow businesspeople, future client prospects, or future business partners from all over the world.

Also so that I can share my technical knowledge with fellow software engineers out there.