Get To Business.

A Few days ago I wrote an article about my past experience with Offshore Outsourcing for Found|Read .
I am re-posting it here for our readers.

As a project manager, I frequently have had to deal with outsourcing work, and offshore outsourcing, specifically. From my past experience, I can only say that while sometimes the costs are very low and, therefore, somewhat seductive, in the long term you generally end up paying more than you expected to.

In early 2005, a friend contacted me and requested that I design a website for his company. He also asked me to take on management of the project, and find the appropriate coder(s) to do the work. The specifications were really simple: build a dynamic website with a few, simple, administration capabilities and a Content Management System.

“That’s not rocket science,” I told him. “It should be completed within few days,” and I hung up. (Would that it were so!)

At the time I had no available coder to work on the project, and while I could have rented a local freelancer to ease my own pain of overseeing the project as manager, I decided to outsource this simple task to an offshore freelancer.
(more…)

After four months of endless meeting and numerous agreement’s revision,
We’re glad to announce that we just gave birth to Lionite LTD.

Lionite will be focusing on developing our main product, The Octabox Web Platform and act as incubator for other great ideas.
In addition, Lionite will be working with a selected group of clients on their own enterprises, sharing our expertise in the web development field.

If you’re interested to hear more about our start-up and services, you can contact me at adam at lionite dot com.

Alpha week #5 has officially ended today, following our weekly meeting. A quick recap of developments in recent weeks:
- User interface API is ready for integration in the Octabox service. The UI API (don’t you love those acronyms..) has been the main focus of development in recent weeks, its core is very nearly done and we’re quite pleased with the results (I will ellaborate on the API in upcoming posts).
- Several graphical widgets were created/updated using the UI API, such as Rounded Corners widget (using all CSS techniques known to man), DivTable widget for esoteric layout positioning, Dialog Box widget with outside buttons and more.
- Statistics recording inside the Octabox service.
- New designs and UI approach for several modules: Private Messages, User Preferences, To-Do. Soon all modules will recieve overhaul for the new Tab and Tag oriented approach.
- Small update to ver. 0.9.3 of the Zend Framework. Upcoming: A review of the Zend Framework

Further updates are forthcoming

The Alpha release of the Octabox service is drawing near (a week from now) and you can feel the excitement in the air. There’s a lot yet to do, and not enough time to do it. But I believe in working under pressure - for some reason, the closer I get to a deadline the more productive I become, both focus and intensity rising up to much higher levels.
I am writing this blog now as I’m taking a break from writing another “blog” titled “Lab report in Signal Analysis and operation of Lock-in Amplifier” which is due tommorow at the University. Did I mention schedule is tight around here? Good thing I don’t waste too much time on sleep.

Being the main and lone developer/programmer on this project at this point means that most of responsibility for Alpha version shipping on time is on my shoulders. There’s nobody to share the load. If I say that I can meet the release schedule, then it’s my sole responsibility to do so. Today, in our “Board meeting”, I had to sort of calm my partners, Tal and Adam, both of which were ready to postpone the release date, seeing that much is yet to be done and only one week left to the date we’ve set. I hope their trust in me would be justified.

(more…)

Here at Octabox, we are happy to announce that Octablog is live!
Octablog will allow our team to notify you about releases.

Stay tuned,
Adam Benayoun