It’s a little bit old mini, but still works great.
We can finally test our software under Safari on Mac. If you are working with our software from a Mac, you can now expect to see the interface glitches that you might have experienced to go away.
PS. Thanks to Shal for providing us with the hardware.
Starting from this January we are undergoing some changes. We’ve just moved to a twice bigger office, but that’s not all.
Shal
Unfortunately, Shal Jacobs, the main developer of our project management software Factory Nova, has decided to pursue his own project and has left Stuffed Guys around Christmas. He was planning to do this for several months, so it didn’t come as a surprise. But certainly this influenced the schedule of the beta version of Factory Nova.
For 2 months I was working on finishing Factory Nova myself. That was an interesting experience for me. I worked some insane hours every day (I think it was around 18 hours every business day, plus a little less on weekends). After I was returning home in the evening, a new working day was starting for me.
New PHP developer
That wasn’t that bad (except the absense of free time), I had some great time programming interesting stuff, I’ve managed to achieve some good progress with the software. But then we were lucky enough to get a new experienced PHP developer on board and now the future of Factory Nova is in good hands (we are really close to finishing beta.. no, really!).
The new developer had to spend several weeks on learning how things already work in FN, but now he is working on the list of the remaining bugs and features at full speed. The new interface is also almost implemented, our designer started working on the fancy icons and I hope that soon I will be able to show some fresh new screenshots.
Slava
In January, we’ve also got one more developer on board. I want to introduce Slava Snakin who is now working on the hotels reservations system which we’ve developed and are now maintaining for our friends in Skoosh International.
+2
We also plan to hire 2 more developers in the next 2 months. One for our Perl-based projects and another for our PHP-based projects. If you happen to live in Moscow, read this blog, have a good great knowledge of Perl or PHP (or better both!) and might be interested in working with us, please feel free to contact us.
The new PHP developer will help us to work on our products and improve the speed with which we release the new versions (this will become especially important with the release of Factory Nova, when we expect our load at least to double).
Coming up next: what’s up with Stuffed Tracker.
After more then a year of enjoying our work in a tiny 20 square meters office, we’ve just moved to a 2 times bigger office in the same building. We are going to hire at least 2 more developers in the next 2 months and we need additional space for them.
Here are some photos of the new room:
As any sane programmers we keep all our code in a source control system (in our case it is CVS).
We also use a PHP framework called Nova System that we’ve created specially for use in our products. This framework should obviously be shared between the products, so naturally it lives in its own directory in our CVS repository.
So for Stuffed Tracker we actually have 2 top directories (”tracker” and “system”) which we have to retrieve from the CVS when preparing a new release. This imposes additional challenges for us, but nothing that we couldn’t handle.
As soon as a new release of Stuffed Tracker is ready, we tag it with appropriate version in CVS and then launch a special script that I’ve wrote using Perl that not only retrieves tracker’s files, but also Nova System’s files and tracker’s documentation from a separate location. It then puts everything in the appropriate directories (”system” inside “tracker”), removes CVS service directories and then packs everything in a zip file with a correct name containing the product’s version number.
We then only need to upload this file to our server and that’s all.
Today I’ve also added one nifty feature to this script that removes comments (PHP and HTML) in Russian from the source files before packing them in the zip. We’ve decided that it is not appropriate to keep Russian comments in the source code, since most people viewing the source won’t be able to read them anyway.
Comments are removed with a very complex regular expression, that I’ve partially borrowed from an excellent book called “Mastering Regular Expressions” (by Jeffrey Friedl). I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand how regular expressions work on the very low level.
This book has a great example of a regular expression that removes C and C++ style comments, even keeping them unchanged if they are inside double or single quotes. I’ve added some of my own logic to this regex. Particularly I wanted to remove the comments that start with “#” as well (they are also used in PHP). And I wanted a string like “// ?>” to work correctly, since in PHP “?>” would not be a part of the comment.
Anyway, I’ve made a slightly complex regex from the book REALLY complex and of course it didn’t work when I first tried it. I had a hard time trying to debug it. And then I’ve found an excellent tool just for my situation. It is called Regex Buddy. They don’t have a trial version available, but I’ve looked at Flash demos and was sold immediately.
It really helped me to make by regex work. I can recommend it to anyone writing at least slightly complex regular expression. Great software!
First of all I am happy to report that we are very pleased with the amount of sales and general interest that we are getting for Stuffed Tracker only a month after it’s initial release. Our hard work and sleepless nights are definitely paying off.
In around a week we will be launching an upgraded version of the product with several new exciting features added. Because of them we will probably even bump the version to 2.1.0 instead of 2.0.3 as originally planned.
We are also trying hard to push our project management software, Factory Nova, towards its release. 90% of all features are ready, but we still have to implement a fantastic new interface that our designer is currently working on, polish the existing features, add the remaining ones, write documentation and do other “release stuff”. We are currently looking at late December/early January release. I will be posting here more news about Factory Nova including screenshots of the new interface as we are moving closer to the launch date.
Maybe a month before the release we plan to launch a private beta for the subscribers of the Factory Nova list (we invite you to subscribe if you are interested)..
Also I would like to announce that in the plans for both of our products is.. a thin client! Soon after the Factory Nova release we will start working on the Windows clients both for Factory Nova and Stuffed Tracker.
We don’t want to do anything big at first. For Stuffed Tracker it will be a simple notifier that will be sitting in your tray. You will be able to configure it to notify you when important events are happening on your site, like a sale, or a particular action, or maybe an arrival of a visitor from a particular referrer or advertising campaign.
For Factory Nova, a windows client will also work as a notifier that will remind you about your tasks, will tell you when new tasks are assigned to you and maybe something else in the same manner. It will also allow you to quickly create new tasks with the convenience of the native Windows interface.
Thin clients will be build upon an XML API that will be added to both products. These APIs will allow anyone to create their own applications (including web based) that will interact with our products and will hopefully do something useful.
I am really excited about our future plans. Hopefully we will have enough time to implement everything we plan.
It has happened so that all of us in Stuffed Guys are Leos (astrologically speaking). And one of the powers that all Leos possess is creativity. I think I can rephrase this and say that the greatest power of Stuffed Guys as a company is creativity.
This is true. We are full of ideas all of the time. And not only about programming and web technologies, Ivan and Shalmoo periodically compose music, for example. I myself am a little creative in everything, including this blog.
So creativity is our main weapon. And we have a top secret plan (just don’t tell anyone, k?) that is making use of our main weapon to smash the competition.
After the initial release of each of our products, we will get so creative with the new versions and will release them so fast that our competition will have a hard time trying to catch up with us. Eventually we will take over the world — all thanks to our extraordinary creative selves.
Nice plan, eh?
Oh, yes!
I don’t have enough energy left to say something original here. So here is a quote from the announcement in our forums:
We are very pleased to announce that two important things have just happened.
- We’ve finally completed a 9 months development of the brand new version of Stuffed Tracker, our conversion tracking software. The new version was rewritten in PHP with tons of new exciting features added.
- Today we’ve also launched our new corporate site starring “Mr. Stuffed”, a stuffed doll from our logo.
New site screenshot:
Stuffed Tracker final screenshot:
Ok, we are now going home to sleep.
For our new corporate web site we wanted something unusual, so together with the designer we’ve come up with Mr. Stuffed - a stuffed doll. Our new web site will be launched along with our new products launches, Mr. Stuffed’s appearance is expected on at least some of the pages.
I’ve recently finished reading a book by Michael A. Cusumano called “The Business of Software“. It helped to crystalize in my mind what was already obvious: the difference between a products oriented and a services oriented company.
Products oriented model is very scalable. You create and sell you own software, usually the only services you provide is support. The labor requirements increase only slightly when you sell 10 licenses of your software per month and then start selling 1000 licenses. With a hit product your profit margin can reach ridicoulos proportions. That’s why so many software companies prefer products oriented model.
With a services oriented model you provide custom programming services to your customers. This model is much much less scalable then a products oriented model and has much lower profit margins. Basically the profit margin is constant with limited ability to increase: it stays the same if you have 50 programmers on staff or 1000 programmers. Also, if your business increases you always have to hire additional people, you actually have to do it proportionally to the increase. Taking into account that it’s usually hard to find good people this model becomes even less attractive.
But the truth is — it’s very hard to create a best-seller product. And even if you would manage to do it, there is no guarantee that one or more competitors will not appear copying the main features of your product and offering their own products at a more attractive price. It’s hard to create a best-seller and it is even harder to repeat the success with the next product.
So there is a sense in a hybrid business model (as Michael Cusumano calls it), when a company creates and sells its own shrink-wrapped software, but also provides custom services to its customers.
The hybrid model is what I am thinking to use for Stuffed Guys. In my opinion it decreases the risks significantly and makes the business model much more balanced. When our two products will be ready and launched, I plan to aggressively promote our customization and custom web programming services along with them.
Finally, the time has come to introduce myself. My name is Sergey Smirnov and I am the owner of Stuffed Guys (and the author of this blog).
I am working with web technologies from 1998. Through these 7 years I’ve tried several roles: an account manager in a big web development company, a project manager in a publishing house responsible for several parts of a portal site (that was back in the “bubble” days) and finally a web programmer, working on my own primarily with English-speaking customers outside Russia.
In Stuffed Guys, besides being responsible for the boring legal work, I also supervise the developement of our two products: a project management system and an ROI tracker. Both products are based on my own initial concepts, I take part in usability testing and what I call “pre-designer design” — the interface design that we do before we handle everything (at the final stages of the development) to a professional designer.
Oh, and I also communicate with our customers, so if you will submit a query via our feedback facility I will be the one who will reply to you as soon as possible.
:)
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