Archive : August 2011

I'm not going to beat around the bush pretending that I'm just telling you about some talks.

Nope.

Honestly, I'd really like it if lots of people voted for these two panels that I'm hoping to be part of March at SXSW Interactive 2012. They're both really fascinating and relevant topics and both should appeal to a broad spectrum of people who are interested in making more successful and engaging digital products, services and experiences.

Do read on...

It seems a bit weird to be posting a video about the East Africa drought and famine as a hurricane lashes into New York, but if you feel like taking a few minutes out from the world's biggest real-time extreme social weather event in human history, then please watch this film that introduces the project and its objectives. 

50/50: Make or Break from 5050good on Vimeo.

Time for some Friday fun from us folks at Made by Many - you can thank us later :-D

Made by Many are looking for some more great technologists to join our team. As a company we conceive, design and develop new digital products and services for our clients. We relentlessly focus on user experience through a synthesis of great design and great technology because we believe that technology isn’t just the cogs in the engine, invisible to user, but is integral to how people feel about a product and the companies that make them. The products we make closely resemble digital start-ups and we use similar approaches and technologies to build them.

Our approach is highly Agile, using Scrum and sometimes Kanban based approaches; we work iteratively but even before that we prototype products with lightweight technologies to refine our thinking and test with customers. 

Our main back-end technology is Ruby, primarily because it is well suited to delivering innovative products in an iterative environment but we also work with NodeJS, iOS, MongoDB and other tech. We believe that making bespoke solutions utilising ‘small tools’ allows us to create innovative, emotional software. A lot of our solutions are deployed on AWS hosting and knowledge of deploying with Chef and scaling services would be helpful.

If you are experienced Ruby developer with a background making digital products and want to work in an environment working with designers and strategists collaborating on conceiving new ideas for products we would love to talk to you about a job here at Made by Many. We are looking for people with opinions about the right thing to do, passion for technology and great chops to pull off difficult coding challenges.

Please apply with your CV and your github.com username at http://madebymany.recruiterbox.com/jobs/4411 or email jobs@madebymany.co.uk

Last week was amazing. Some truly incredible people got in touch with us - individuals, developers, teams and agencies from all over the world - all of whom want to run projects. This blog post is intended to bring people bang up-to-date with the latest thinking, planning, decisions, explanations and so on. Everything continues to 'evolve' at a frightening rate. 

In recent months we have hosted a few events at our London HQ. We've held a couple of show and tells, plus some panel chats and presentations on different technologies and ways of working. These have been fun: bright people sharing ideas with a very engaged audience usually makes for a good time. Also, each event offers an opportunity to meet new people, which is great.

At the end of this month we're hosting a talk by the hugely inspirational Cindy Gallop, and then in early October we're welcoming a panel of highly interesting characters for Storywarp 2. Read on for more info on these events, and how to RSVP.

The weekend was fun - we've pretty much got the site sorted - Andrew is trying to find time to make some changes we all discussed over the weekend at the Good for Nothing event. Things are changing on a daily basis - so I thought it might be good to provide an update.

This week, we look at 3 recent presentations on lean startups and customer development. 

To start off,  Janice Fraser, entrepreneur and founder/CEO at Luxr, a residency programme for lean startups in San Francisco, covers the basics and then goes on to explain how lean UX can change the way we do business. Some good sketches and quotes.  

As we reported yesterday, we have had so many great suggestions posted to Good by Ideas that we have decided to try to do justice to as many of them as possible by building a temporary countdown site. Online for just 50 days, this site will showcase some great fundraisers and their efforts, as well as telling some of the stories of those affected in East Africa – and we are assembling it as we speak!

It’s been a weird few days in London. 

It’s hard imagining how these events might have felt without the Internet, or whether they would even have taken place.