THE AGILITYFEAT BLOG
At AgilityFeat, we are more than just designers and coders. We are also thought leaders. Our team has spoken at conferences around the US, Europe, and Latin America. We were early leaders in applying agile methodologies to nearshore software development in Latin America. We shared these lessons in this blog through 2015. These days, we blog mainly about our other passion, WebRTC. Find us at https://webrtc.ventures/blog/.
Ruby hiring is our problem
"I want to make Ruby hiring your problem." One of our current clients said this to me in our very first phone call. He was looking for software development teams in Latin America that could handle Ruby on Rails development, and naturally...
Interview with David Blutenthal – Founder & CEO of Moodsnap.fm
As a friend of mine likes to say, music and technology are the two coolest industries on the planet. Last month, I went to my first Music/Tech meetup in Boston where I met the organizer, David Blutenthal. David and I got to talking and I...
How to make your web business idea a reality (for non-technical Entrepreneurs)
At AgilityFeat, we spend lots of time speaking with entrepreneurs about their ideas. As our tagline says, “it’s in our DNA”. We’re a company that is often approached by entrepreneurs, filled with passion but stuck on the steps to take to...
7 Things about #UX I learned from @DanRubin
Yesterday I was in Freiburg Germany for the Smashing Magazine conference, where I attended Dan Rubin’s excellent workshop on User Experience design. Dan is a very noted UX designer, author, and a great photographer too. The workshop was...
Lean Startup Advice for Entrepreneurs
Eric Ries recently posted an article on LinkedIn called “Five Ways You May Be Failing Your Company (Or Making It Fail Itself)”. The takeaways were culled in-part from last year’s Lean Startup Conference. The article offers succinct,...
3 Lean games for your next company retreat
Has your company adopted lean or agile, but it still hasn't quite sunk into your culture? You may want to incorporate some lean games into your next company retreat or all-hands meeting. Games can be a great way to have fun, do some team...
4 tries with real time frameworks
A common thread in many of the applications we build at AgilityFeat is real time messaging. In the traditional client-server request-based communication pattern, the only way a client receives a message from the server is because the...
Announcing Product Consultations
One of the most fun things that I get to do is to speak with entrepreneurs about their business ideas. Most of the time, they are contacting me to find out how much it will cost to build their idea (or re-build their product). As one...
Why Entreprenuers Should Learn to Code
It may seem odd initially that someone who sells software development to businesses would encourage other entrepreneurs to learn one of the skills that AgilityFeat offers. Why would I want more people to learn to do what we can do for...
Get inside your users’ head with UX “Think Alouds” (Video)
For all the analytics that exist now to measure how users are using your web application, there's still one gray area that is hard to measure. What exactly is your user thinking? Why did they find that interface you designed so hard to...
Branching Strategies for Agile Teams
Branching code is a bit of a pain. And agile teams need to do more of it typically. This is because we are balancing new features with production bug fixes, and working in short scrum sprints while also keeping an eye on longer term...
2 takeaways for Founders from @PaulSingh at @TechCocktail
There were some things that Paul Singh said last week that I can blog about. There were also a lot of jokes he made and insider advice that he gave which was quickly qualified with a "Don't tweet this please or I will kill you."...
6 Tips for Effective Stand-up Meetings in Distributed Agile
At AgilityFeat, we work by applying Agile methodologies in a distributed manner. Our clients are generally based in the US while our team members are located in Costa Rica, Nicaragua as well as the US (Charlottesville and Boston)....
6 ways your architecture can hurt agility
When I do agile coaching for our clients, I hear a lot of Yesbuts. That's when I say something that agile teams are supposed to do (like short iterations or frequent releases), and the client says "Yes, but..." There are always lots of...
Ruby development continues to grow in Latin America
Nearshore Americas quoted AgilityFeat in an article earlier this week on the growth of Ruby on Rails development teams in Latin America. While there's not hard data around it, the success of companies like AgilityFeat provides anecdotal...
3 UX Red Flags (Video Interview)
How do you know when you have a User Experience problem with your web application? I sat down with our UX lead Mariana Lopez and asked her to talk about some common Red Flags to watch out for. You can see the video of our skype chat or...
4 ways to keep your design skills fresh
Web design is a rapidly changing field, and it's not easy to keep up with all the changes. It's critical that you not only keep up to date on the latest technology changes and trends, but you also have to keep your designs fresh and...
3 sources of UX inspiration
Mariana Lopez is our UX lead and a key part of our most successful projects. Her ability to get inside the customers' head and quickly understand their processes and challenges is an important part of the UX and design assessment work...
Why Continuous Deployment is important for you
Last week I went to the Lean Start-up Meetup in Boston where Florian Motlik of Codeship lead a discussion with Amos Benninga from GrabCad, Dan Rowe from ETSY and Ken Eimer from InsightSquared on Continuous Deployment. The presentation was...
My Chores App
As our tagline for AgilityFeat says, we are entrepreneurs, it's in our dna. And for some of us, some of that DNA is shared. Andrea and Daniel Phillips are the sibling founders of the My Chores App. The are also AgilityFeat team members so...
Kenny Rogers and Customer Development
You got to know when to hold em.. We’re believers in Lean Startup here at AgilityFeat. In addition to our boutique UX/ Design and Software Development Services, we’re working on a few business ideas to scratch our collective...
Why Responsive Web Design is critical for you!
Yes, you need a responsive web design. Let me tell you why and what are considerations you have to keep in mind. A New Era Has Already Started In 2007 Steve Jobs talked about an upcoming “post-PC” era, an era of devices that “aren't as...
UX and Agile: How we do it
UX Magazine had an article last month by Michael Lai entitled "UX and Agile: Tying the knot", which used a great marriage analogy to discuss how UX and agile are and must be intertwined. At AgilityFeat we are very passionate about both UX...
Luxr to offer entrepreneurial training online
Luxr.co has been providing great content for accelerators on Lean Startup methods for a while, and now they are launching a monthly subscription model that we can all use to access their content. This looks like a very exciting offering...
Red stickies as an expedite lane in Scrum
When teams move to Scrum from a more chaotic development method, there is often a struggle with convincing the new Product Owner (or the business folks that they report to) that the team cannot be retargeted on a whim. A benefit of Scrum...