Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Core·Continuum launches new Rails site for Outsell Inc.

A long over due post. Last year we launched a new rails based site for Outsell Inc.

This was our first big rails launch since we started Core·Continuum.

"Core·Continuum partners with Outsell to revitalize web presence, delivering segmented customer information, end-to-end commerce and online document distribution for the information industry pioneer -- October 2006."

Core·Continuum moves to new location

We just moved to a our new location. Finally we have our own space to grow into.

Find us at 589 Howard, SF

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Pandora Rocks

pandora.com provides a very cool music recommendation engine.

The RIA app provides a slick UI. It's a Flash based UI that is built using the OpenLaszlo framework. This post from Tom Conrad notes their involvement.

The recommendations are based on the MusicGenomeProject
that has been ongoing since 2000.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Shamless Plug

Blast Radius annouced the new Redwood Shores office. Subbu, Demo, Dave and myself all came back together this summer to help build out the California region.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Agile Planning

This is a nice concise post on the benefits of agile planning from Martin Fowler:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FivePoundBag.html

It's somewhat of an art form getting it right. I've always liked the analogy of a bucket for each iteration. You want to make sure the bucket is full for each iteration (ie, don't have too few stories)
to maximise the team's velocity. It's always possible to overfill the bucket a little before stories start falling out but putting too much in can burn out the team, reduce the quality and cut corners on functionality.

Martin mentions estimation and tracking as a key inputs. I've found that getting developers to estimate at the task level rather than a story gives more focus and more acturate estimates. Getting the developers to track the time spent on each task on a card or board where they can also see their estimate also helps. Too often we don't close the feedback loops with estimation to see how the estiamtes compare too the actuals. This exercise improves the quality of the estimation.