Assembla Blog

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 27 Jan 2007 11:53:00 GMT

We use trial projects to help find the best developers to work with. We hire candidates to do paid trial tasks from our live projects. In working with the candidates, we understand how good they are and how well the they work in our process. We try to sign the good ones for longer term contracts. It’s a lot of work, but it is well worth the effort.

Sometimes, clients want to do this themselves. Or, they want us to perform in a trial, which is a hassle for us, but a good idea for them. That brings us to the subject of how to select trial tasks. To make the process work, we need good trial tasks.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:23:00 GMT

A questioner over at DZone asks “how do you guys make money at this? ... just want to know if you guys will be around awhile…”

The free version will always be available, and we will continue to invest in it. However, we will soon launch extensions that will provide the tools that corporate projects need to recruit and manage distributed developers, including a developer directory, time tracking, billing, and payment services.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 20 May 2006 22:53:00 GMT

Jon Udell included me in his Friday podcast series this week with a conversation with Andy Singleton about building global teams . Jon has been putting up with me since 1993, when he edited some freelance articles that I wrote for Byte magazine. In 2003 he coined the term “dynamic development” to describe the work I was doing. He has recently been commenting on user innovation and the power of human networks to do work beyond open source sofware. In this conversation, he turns me on to Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and he cautions against a “walled garden”. Maybe we’ll be able to work together on a universally portable user profile.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sun, 30 Apr 2006 10:21:00 GMT

Over the past few months, we have done a lot of work on Assembla.com, our online service for building and running distributed software teams, and Breakout, the underlying platform for professional networks. Now, we are ready to share. If you have suggestions for user groups that can benefit from this resource, or bloggers that might be interested in it, let me know at andy@assembla.com Read on for the story->

Posted by andy@assembla.com Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:57:00 GMT

Pito Salas invited me to a “Geek Dinner”, which I attended tonight. It was organized by Pito and blogger Adam Green, and populated by RSS and blogging geeks. I pitched the Software Professional network and came away with some positives:

• Two different guys came up to me and said, essentially, that they manage multiple groups of unruly open source developers, and they will try our system. Mental note – a couple of guys asked about time tracking and billing. I got the same question at the Ruby Users Group meeting.

• I learned more from Dan Bricklin about the wiki/spreadsheet he has been working on. Once I started thinking about how it lives out in data space, and can pull data and catch data from other servers, I started thinking it will be big. Definitely worth adding as a tool. It will be useful for management reporting and for securities research.

• Adam Green said “my last company (Andover.net at the height of the craziness in 99) was sold to Sourceforge. How does this competeâ€?. I explained what we were doing and why I thought we would roll right over VA Software, and he agreed.

I ended up giving an impassioned speech about what a great business software suddenly is, with costs down, demand up, and innovation flourishing. Maybe that one beer wasn’t such a great idea on four hours of sleep. More on that later.