TheAppGuys

You may have noticed that it has become a bit quiet on this blog lately. The reason for this is that my business partner and friend Marko Tosic and I have been awfully busy getting our own company off the ground.

This is something both of us wanted to do in a long time, and together we finally managed to pull it off. The result of these efforts is TheAppGuys GmbH. As the name suggests, our main focus is App development for mobile devices. As
we have a very solid background in server-side development, too, we also offer development of backends / middleware for more complicated Apps that need a server-side component. And because it is such an interesting, useful and fun topic, we round off our portfolio with services in the area of AI, data mining and general awesomeness.

All the self-promotion aside, the main motivation for the company was to build a place we ourselves (and hopefully our current & future employees) like to work. Initially we were toying around with a number of get-rich-quick-startup schemes (doesn’t everybody these days ?), but in the end we decided that what we really wanted is just to do proper, quality software development. Marko and I both really love to build good software, so we try to do what we think is necessary to achieve that:

• honesty towards customers and employees
• decent work hours
• continuously improving skills

(sounds almost like a mission statement — yuck)

That doesn’t mean that we want to lay low, quite the contrary, but we believe that the common trend in software development —doing ridiculous hours and feeling cool because of it— is not only harmful to people but to the quality of software in general.

Time will tell if we will be able to build a growing business around these values. or if we will succumb to the general panic driven circus show that so often is called software development.

So far, things are running pretty smooth, we have a number of customers and just hired our first dev. So the outlook is pretty good.

In related news, we are starting to hire more developers, so if you are into one or more of Java, Scala, C / C++, Objective C and some Haskell, send a short application (preferably with a link to some Open Source Project of yours on github) to jobs@theappguys.de. You can find more details on our job page.

And of course you are more than welcome to follow our company blog and twitter account

The downside of this whole development is that I have shamefully neglected my private projects. I do however finally have a public repo on maven central, where I will push all new versions of Actuarius and (hopefully soon) the sbt junit xml listener. This is especially usefull for the xml listener, as that way you will only need to include the plugin definition and are good to go. No need to mess about with additional repo definitions.

And finally the mandatory advertisement (the first and (probably) last on this Blog, promise): If you do need premium App- / Middleware Development, look no further, go to http://www.theappguys.de. They do an awesome job, trust me :)