{"id":6685,"date":"2011-05-19T10:57:54","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T15:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/?p=6685"},"modified":"2011-05-19T10:57:54","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T15:57:54","slug":"mindquilt-whats-in-your-stack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2011\/05\/19\/mindquilt-whats-in-your-stack\/","title":{"rendered":"MindQuilt: What's in your stack?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this new series “What’s in your stack?”<\/a> I ask various development teams what technologies, processes, and practices they use to write their applications, get them out the door, and do the ongoing care-and-feeding required.<\/i><\/p>\n

MindQuilt<\/a> is often described as a “private Quora,” the Yammer of the all the Q&A sites out there. They’re a relatively new and small startup in Austin, but with a fair amount of use, deploying their software as a SaaS. As such, they’re a good example of he new type of application development and delivery that I see a lot of now-a-days.<\/p>\n

I asked their CEO, Dan Kim a few questions about their stack and process:<\/p>\n

What’s MindQuilt do?<\/h2>\n

I’m CEO of MindQuilt Inc, a knowledge management platform to track, organization, and capture new knowledge and documentation so your company can reduce project and operational risks.<\/p>\n

What tools, languages, and platforms are you using for development and delivering your
\nsoftware?<\/h2>\n

We use a python stack built on top of django. Mixpanel<\/a> to track our funnel. We don’t watch people at all because we want to preserve people trust in putting their proprietary information on our platform. Instead, we use Olark<\/a> so people can send in direct feedback or chat with us live if there is a problem.<\/p>\n

Does python encourage spaghetti stacks? Is it more difficult to maintain long-term?<\/h2>\n

Yes it is a concern but that’s true of any language. Some languages (plus frameworks) combat spaghetti by forcing people into a rigid model but that tends to produce overly verbose code with lots of boiler plate. Additionally, it’s not spaghetti code that’s a problem but more spaghetti architecture. That’s outside of the scope of any language or framework. You need to do reviews often. No way around that.<\/p>\n

What’s a tool that didn’t work out, and one that has worked surprisingly well?<\/h2>\n

We tried using Pivotal+Chat for a long long time. We found that it just didn’t work out so well for us. I think our team is too small. What has been working are daily calls between our US office and the technology team in Europe. If we need to share a screen we use GoToMeeting and screen-sharing.<\/p>\n

What’s motivated you do off-shore development? What benefits are you getting?<\/h2>\n

We’re not really<\/i> offshoring since:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. My CTO is Romanian and lives in Romania and I have worked with him in person for several years (in Germany and the UK).<\/li>\n
  2. Our developers are full time employees with all benefits and stock options. They do nothing else but to work on MindQuilt.<\/li>\n
  3. The primary reason for the dev staff to be in Romania is because that’s where my CTO is.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As for cost savings, yes we have a bit of cost savings over the market rate, but in a startup, you almost always have people working for under market rate because:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • they are passionate about the product and have an equity stake<\/li>\n
    • startups have no money<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      Disclosure:<\/b> MindQuilt is a client.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      MindQuilt is a relatively new and small startup in Austin, but with a fair amount of use, deploying their software as a SaaS. As such, they\u2019re a good example of he new type of application development and delivery that I see a lot of now-a-days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,38],"tags":[223,497,553,625],"class_list":["post-6685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-whats-in-your-stack","tag-dan-kim","tag-mindquilt","tag-off-shoring","tag-python"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}