We are excited to announce that our resident node.JS guru, Allan Naranjo has been selected to speak at not one but two upcoming conferences in San Francisco. In October, Allan will...
Announcing: Pi’s, Node, and Real-Time things
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design
7 Keys to ensure harmony between UX and Development
Software development is by its nature a very creative process. Obviously graphic design is an art form, but there is also an art to the technical architecture of a project, the coding style, the way you test, and the interaction design....
Hiring a Remote Team
Last week Entrepreneur.com featured a great article on hiring remote teams. The article, written by David and Carrie McKeegan has a wonderful list of tips for remote hiring that are relevant for in-house hires as well. Since AgilityFeat...
Awesome team building for distributed teams
At AgilityFeat, we are a very distributed and very agile team. Culture is important for any team, but it's even more important for distributed teams because you need a strong culture to overcome the possible inefficiencies of doing work...
Teachstone looking for an Applications Lead Architect
If you're interested in working in one of the nicest small cities in the US (Charlottesville, Virginia), with a very interesting education business (Teachstone), and you want the side benefit of working with our team at AgilityFeat, then...
Do you really have the time for a startup?
It’s not enough to have a good business idea, you must have the time to execute on that idea. Which makes this story from Wired magazine even more impressive. Dutch programmer and designer Pieter Levels is on a quest to build a new...
Free Agile Training
If you're looking for a couple hours of agile video to watch, a way to help you go to sleep at night, or just from free agile training, then I present to you the following videos. Our development team at AgilityFeat is spread out around...
Web RTC and Designing Realtime Experiences
We are excited to announce that three members of the AgilityFeat Team were recently guests on The Web Platform Podcast. Mariana Lopez, Allan Naranjo and Arin Sime spent some time with the Web Platform Podcast crew discussing a broad range...
Using publish/subscribe to synchronize presentation slides
A common use case for real-time messaging between web clients is to keep something in synch. For example, in the Sensei tool that we built for one of our clients, each remote participant in an agile retrospective should be able to see the...
Design for your customers first so you don’t perish
This week I read a good TechCrunch article about the importance of putting your customers first. While this sounds obvious, author Ron Miller is making a crucial point when he says to put your customer “at the center of everything you do,...
Why I’ve moved to Costa Rica
About three years ago, David Alfaro and I launched on a great adventure together, building AgilityFeat into an international boutique software development firm. I was living in Virginia in the US, and David built up our operations in...
UX lessons learned from a real-time 2nd screen experience
The dust has settled from the World Cup, and I have slowly weaned myself off the TV and back into family and work life. It was a very exciting World Cup to watch this year, and as a fan of underdog teams like the USA and Costa Rica, it...
HTML5DevConf Video: 6 Months with WebRTC
Last May I had the pleasure of presenting at the HTML5DevConf in San Francisco. With me was David Alfaro, AgilityFeat co-founder, and Mariana Lopez, our UX lead. Also joining us remotely was Allan Naranjo, a software engineer at...
Toying with a World Cup second screen experience
This is a very stressful month for me, because I'm trying to balance work, family time, and World Cup viewing time. As a fan of the United States and Costa Rica national teams, it's also been a pretty wild World Cup to watch. Costa Rica...
The 3 phases of MVP development
The other day I was speaking with a potential development customer when I realized two things: 1) He doesn’t need us … yet. 2) He can’t afford us … yet. “Yet” is a key addendum to both realizations. He has some interesting ideas, and a...
Recording in Real Time with the Web Audio API (Part 1)
Building software to manipulate files is always tricky, however when we are talking about audio files and specifically about the Web Audio API in HTML5, this challenge gets significantly more difficult. In this post, we will look at the...
Video: Mariana Lopez on Real-Time Interaction Design
Last week our UX lead Mariana Lopez presented at the ModevUX conference in Washington DC on how to do interaction design for Real-Time applications. Below is the video from her talk - check it out to learn some best practices for your...
2 Quick examples of WebRTC in-context communications
I believe the great promise of WebRTC based video, audio and data applications has nothing to do with browser compatibility or plugins. It all comes down to finding innovative ways that you can use these technologies to add value through...
Real-Time Apps: Designing for the 4th Dimension
Today Mariana Lopez gave a talk at the ModevUX conference in Washington DC to a packed room on UX and design considerations when building real-time web applications. The slides are available below, and we have also posted the key...
NYC WebRTC presentation
Back in April I had a lot of fun presenting on WebRTC at the New York City Node.js meetup. We met at the offices of Shutterstock in the Empire State Building, and I was the second of two presenters that evening. Despite the late hour, the...
AgilityFeat client nPulse Technologies acquired for $60 million
Last week had me beaming with pride when I got the news that former AgilityFeat client nPulse Technologies has been acquired by FireEye for $60 million. TechCrunch described what both companies do this way: FireEye helps companies detect...
How to make a million dollars with WebRTC
There are two types of people interested in new technologies: geeks who enjoy the technical high of being an early adopter or writing the early tutorials and books, and those who are looking for how to make a million dollars or more off...
MoDevUX Preview with Mariana Lopez
We're only a few short weeks away from MoDevUX and our UX Guru, Mariana Lopez sat down with the Jamie from MoDev to preview her session Design in the 4th Dimension: Interaction Design for Real Time Applications. This session is for...
Getting off on the Right Foot- Inside Sprint Zero
“How do we get started?” This is a question we hear from clients all the time, often it’s the first question they ask after signing a contract. Most clients are familiar with the concepts of Agile at that point, including the processes...
The ideal agile team is…
As a recovering agile coach*, I'm sometimes asked a question about the make up of an ideal agile team. The idea of having scrum teams around 7-9 people is well known. It's also well known that they should be cross disciplinary, and that...