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We create interactive web sites, using the most modern software and project management technologies. We focus on the quality of the work we deliver, we care about creating usable solutions. Learn More
The Blog
May 15, 2008 @ 04:31 PM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
We’ve decided to start a new fun project in the last few days. We’re announcing our new podcast named The Spin Show, which will feature weekly episodes. The subject will mainly contain news about the Internet Industry in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East, and interview with professionals in the region. Instead of explaining what it is, I’ll invite you to
If you have any questions, comments or want to get in touch about the podcast, just email us at podcast AT spinbits.com.
May 11, 2008 @ 03:03 PM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
We are doing it again, I’ve just announced DemoCamp Dubai 2, which will take place on May 27th 2008 at the Radisson SAS in Dubai Media City on May 27th at 7:30PM.
It’s great to see DemoCamp happen again here in Dubai. The first event was a success in all senses, we had great people attending, awesome presentations, and overall a great evening for all those involved. We hope DemoCamp 2 is even better, and the community around the event keep coming with their enthusiasm.
April 24, 2008 @ 05:02 AM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
As mentioned in our last post, our team is bigger and we are extremely excited with the new members of our team. It’s key for a business as small as ours to get it right when hiring its first employees. We knew that a “bad hire” would affect us tremendously by slowing our effort to serve our customers with quality. Following the same line of thought, a “great hire” would increase our productivity in so many ways that we decided to take the decision to hire slowly.
Although hiring each employee happened naturally, we’ve noticed that, unconsciously, we ended up following the same principles/rules for each one of them.
Rule #1 – Hire the person
In every single case, we hired our employees because they are smart and passionate people who care about their work. By smart, we mean we felt that although they might not possess the skills and experience we would want them to have now, we know they have the capacity to learn fast and be effective if we provide an environment where they can share their ideas and concerns, and learn from their peers. Also, we felt the passion through their comments, ideas, and work was an indicator of good things to follow. Getting a feeling of the person’s attitude eventually tells you more about how they will fit into a team than asking the usual interview questions.
Rule #2 – Say No to the traditional hiring process
We usually ask for resumes/CVs to get a sense of the work and education for potential candidates; however, we ended up hiring the ones for which we haven’t even seen a CV, or have interviewed in the more traditional sense. In all cases, we had previous experience with dealing with each of those individuals, even if out of a professional setting, or for a very short period of time. We felt that we didn’t want to ask the usual interview questions, since we never felt they added value when we were in the “being interviewed” position.
Rule #3 – Find complementary talent
We had the chance to interview some very interesting individuals; however, we settled with a team where we always have more than one individual who can perform a specific task; at the same time, we have professionals that have great experience in areas others are not as strong. It’s a great feeling to know that at least one of us can fill in for another developer/designer if one needs to be absent, without compromising the quality of the work we produce.
Rule #4 – Identify who to not hire
In a lot of cases, we interviewed candidates we wanted to hire because we needed help, and the person seemed “good enough”, but we didn’t settle for “just good” professionals. In most cases, the decision to not hire is made easy by feeling a lack of passion or interest in the industry or work, or just if the person doesn’t fit within the company culture. This rule is influenced by Joel Spolsky’s great Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, which states that you can only have one opinion after an interview, either Hire or No Hire, if in doubt, No Hire is the default answer’.
Our conclusion is that following those principles will definitely yield a strong candidate, and someone that will fit well the requirements for any job position. Of course, we’ll add, change, or even remove some of those rules in the near future, but that’s expected and is part of the learning process we are going through.
April 22, 2008 @ 02:23 PM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
With an increasing workload, we’ve had the need to get more resources on our side. We tried to take some time to find good people, we worked with contractors, but felt the need to have some face to face talks. More importantly, we want to work with people who understand where we want to get as a company, and have input in the direction our work is taking; in other words, we want to create a company culture. So, our team did grow from 3 to 5, we added two great individuals to our team.
Fouad Masoud has joined our team from Amman, Jordan one month ago, and has already proven to be a very important asset. Fouad did some designer work a few years ago, but he is currently a UI Developer, being the guy helping us to make our great designs be displayed on a browser. He’s also learning some Ruby on Rails tips, and will gradually give us more help in the back-end of our applications. We worked with Fouad in a previous project, soutii.com in late 2007, and were very happy with his work.
Michael Smith joined us this week, he is one of the guys behind places.ae. We met Michael in the Rails UAE group meetings, we went out a few times, and we had some fun hacking rails.ae together. He also worked with us for 2 weeks at the end of last year, and did some work on exporting data from restate.ae into Facebook. He’s a very energetic and entertaining guy and will bring not only his technical skills, but a very enthusiastic attitude to our group.
We’re looking forward to having fun with a bigger team, and be able to tackle problems with more brain power than ever.
March 16, 2008 @ 04:20 PM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
For the last few months, we have been talking about trying to create an event/movement where we could get together with other Internet professionals in Dubai and share some of our knowledge and experiences. After witnessing the great events put up by the Tech community in Toronto, Canada, I decided that we should put an event together and take an active role into creating those community events. So, with the great folks at Argaam, we are organizing and sponsoring DemoCamp Dubai, which will take place on March 25th 2008 in the Radisson SAS Dubai Media City.
We did put together a web site with details about the event, check it out at http://democampdubai.org. If you want to join the event and be part of the discussions, join the Google Group.
We hope to see you there.
February 16, 2008 @ 06:48 AM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
I and Rida have some speaking engagements in Europe in the next couple of months. We’re happy to share some of our knowledge in a couple of very interesting conferences that will happen in Europe in April.
I – Cloves Carneiro Jr – will be speaking at the RubyFools conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on April 1st-2nd and in Oslo, Norway on April 3rd-4th. I’ll be giving a couple of talks titled “Introduction to Rails” and “Ruby/Rails tools”. I’m very excited to be in the same lineup as some great Ruby folks, such as Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, Peter Cooper, Dave Thomas and Evan Phoenix to name just a few; so, I’m expecting to learn a lot and meet some interesting people.
Rida Al Barazi will be speaking at RuPy 2008, which happens in Poznan, Poland on April 12-13 2008. Rida will be giving a 2-hours talk titled “Is Rails as agile as advertised”. From the RuPy web site: The idea behind the conference is to try to animate Central- and East-European Python and Ruby communities.
If you’d like to meet either myself or Rida, feel free to contact us at one of the conferences or via this post. See you in Europe.
February 07, 2008 @ 12:53 PM
Posted by Rida Al Barazi
After it’s been a while since we talked about restate.ae, today we are happy to announce restate.ae new face. We’ve been working on getting the new design out for a while now but we’ve been also busy with other projects that delayed it a bit.
We tried our best in the new design to take good care of the user experience, we worked on how to hook the users up to browse the site more. It was very interesting as well looking at restate.ae statistics and try to figure out ways to make the users notice some rarely used features and encourage them to use those feature more.
Talking about user experience, today I will give a talk at Emirates Internet Group case studying restate.ae. The talk will be in Arabic, it will take place in Knowledge Village in Dubai, Conference Room 2 around 07:30PM, see you around :)
February 03, 2008 @ 12:02 PM
Posted by Rida Al Barazi
Since we started SpinBits we’ve done a couple of projects remotely without the chance to even meet the client sometimes. This helped us develop some practices to make our work smoother and keep the client happy with the results. Here are our 5 tips for remote work:
- Communication tools: We are big fans of tools, using the right tools in the moment saves time and increase efficiency. The tools of remote work of course are online communication tools, we depend on IM for chatting with the client, thanks to Adium we are available on all mostly used messengers, we also use Skype for video conferencing. We finally use Basecamp for project management. It really helps us keep track of things and have everything stored in a central place where we can refer to later on.
- Dates: Dates are part of any project even offline projects, but with online projects they are more important. Try to set dates for everything for every deliverable, every meeting and every milestone. This will help you focus in getting things done and organize yourself and your tasks better to be ready on that date.
- Twist obstacles: One of the main issues of remote work is the timezone difference. Utilize this time difference for your own benefit by scheduling your meetings and deliverables with the client by both ends of the day. One thing we normally do, we try to get the comments from our client in the morning (the client’s evening) and then by our evening, another drop will be available for him to review.
- Focus and say no: Get yourself some lone time where you quit all your IMs, notifiers, browser tabs and focus completely on finishing the task in hand, this will help you be more productive. One of the main issues of being always connected, specially with clients, is the requests you may receive from the clients online as “small” or “quick” request, sometimes it would be nice to do it on the spot; but, sometimes it’s more efficient to say “No” and schedule it for discussion or add it to Basecamp to be worked out later.
- Keep track of progress: Finally try to always keep track of progress and measure how close you are from delivering the requested features on time. Measure the features you have to work on and be very honest with yourself when estimating the right time and right effort. Track that effort and make sure you keep up with it.
Those are our practices for remote work with clients from overseas, what are your tips and tricks?
More on the subject:
January 03, 2008 @ 10:53 AM
Posted by Cloves Carneiro Jr
As we get started to roll in 2008, we decided to look back and evaluate the things that happened in the company in 2007. The first year of a company is always the hardest one, because is the year where you establish in a new market, and where you have to make a difference to be noticed by potential clients, and people involved in your area of work.
Of course, our goal goes beyond just being noticed, we are working hard to become authorities in the Web development space in the region, and internationally. We managed to work on some very interesting applications, and to make clients happy with what we delivered.
We already wrote about most of the things that happened, so in one paragraph, here’s our year in review. We launched restate.ae, Akhtaboot, and Soutii, all Web 2.0 applications that are very unique features not seen in the region. My book Beginning Rails was published in the summer, and I spoke at a few conferences and Rails user groups in Poland, Phoenix-AZ, Santa Clara-CA, and Dubai. We moved offices a couple of times after a long wait for office space. We hired a great designer/front-end guy who’s working on some great new projects.
We worked with great clients from quite a few different places, such as Jordan, Abu Dhabi, and California. We performed a lot of remote work, and have been very successful at delivering application on time regardless of time zones. We started to write open source code and share some of the things we work on every day back to the community.
A lot happened in 2007, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg for SpinBits. We are starting the year busy with client work and will be see clients launch a few sites/applications we worked on very soon. We are also planning to start working on a couple of in-house products that will take us to the next level, more on that very soon.
Happy New Year!
December 27, 2007 @ 12:38 PM
Posted by Rida Al Barazi
A couple of months ago we moved to our new office and now we moved to even a bigger and newer one. It is still in the same building (Al Thuraya2 Tower) in DMC, but we moved two floors up to the 8th floor.
The main reason we moved actually is the space, specially after our spinning family got bigger and Mohanad Alyajouri joined us a couple of weeks ago as our web designer/ front-end developer.
Mohanad has already start working on some projects that we are about to launch. Things are spinning and we have some really cool projects that we’ll announce soon; so, stay tuned…
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