Team matters
Or more accurately...teams matter! With the initial Beta release of indi I wanted to say some words about my team. A little over a year ago we were all working on DARPA research projects, and we, as a team, decided to go the "product route". Now, switching from a consulting-oriented company to a product-oriented company is a lot of work, but more importantly it requires the entire team's commitment to make it a success. And I must say that our team has kept that commitment. Building what we have in just shy of a year is a huge effort. Each person on our team continues to amaze me in how well they each pick up and learn what needs to be learned and to do what needs to be done.
Dave and I have worked together for close to 19 years (yeah...exactly!) He is one of the best programmers I know. Right now Dave handles lots of our low-level code development. Whether its integrating extended MAPI with Ruby or the building installers with the OS X Carbon API or even scripting iCal with AppleScript...Dave just plows through and produces incredible results. We have to perform some major back-flips iterating on an implementation that gets things right, and no matter how much work it takes Dave to accomplish a task, he is ready to start over if its the right thing to do. As every programmer knows, the worst feeling in the world is to solve a hard problem and then have that solution become unnecessary because of a change in requirement...but Dave is always positive, always ready to do what must be done. Most of Dave's work in not thrown away mind you, its just something that I really admire about him.
Tom is another amazing programmer. Many of you guys may know Tom since he administrates RubyForge. As part of our product effort Tom has been working on all our service infrastructure. Tom has picked up Ruby on Rails in no time, and has produced a great foundation for us to build upon. Not only is Tom kicking at building the services code though, he is also great at building the client side of that code. I have just never been good at tinkering with all the stuff you have to to configure things like Postgres, Apache (or GForge...ug), but Tom not only does a great job, but actually automates (with tests) everything he does to verify the integrity of what he is building. Of course, while all this is going on, Tom continues to work on PMD and RubyForge. Oh, Tom also single handedly built the beginnings of our Linux support for indi (Evolution plugins, runtime, etc) but since the Flash 8 player does not (yet) support Linux, that work has to sit on the sidelines...for now!
Ryan and I have known each other almost as long as Dave and I have. Ryan is an artist...but I don't mean a graphics artist (although he is amazing with Photoshop)...I mean an artist. Ryan is actually a very good musician, but again, than is not what I mean. Ryan and I have done most of the UI development for indi. Ryan is an artist in the sense that he always programs with style. Everything he does has a style that is driven by his artistic sense. He constantly iterates his implementations seeking a balance of form and function. Ryan had to ramp to learn ActionScript 2.0 last spring...and learn it he has. When Ryan and I first worked together at a company named Roku 10 years ago, Ryan was tasked to build a calendar (month, week, day view) in Java 1.1. Now, if anyone remembers Java 1.x...it was very hard to achieve good performance with AWT, but Ryan produced with flying colors. He also NEVER wanted to build another calendar again! Of course, then comes indi and what is the first thing I ask Ryan to do?...yeah...build a calendar. Ryan always delivers great results with his UI work, and is a stickler for details, which anyone who puts the indi card games in slow motion will immediately see.
Last but very much not least is Mark. Mark is my COO, but the first thing to know about Mark is the "C" in his title in no way means his view of work is delegating and controlling those who work for him. You see, Mark served as a Marine, and as such believes that his job is to do whatever has to be done. Mark handles everything administratively for our company, and I mean everything! Mark deals with payrolls, accounting and all the other crap (his words) that makes a company tick, and its no small task. Its a huge amount of work...and most of the time its not very fun work. Mark is tireless at performing it though. None of us ever worry about the admin side of the company with Mark there, which lets us fully focus on building our product. But that's not it by a long shot, Mark is also Business Development, Marketing...oh and he wrote the indi Getting Started Guide because you know how much developers like to document.
That's my team. They are great to work with, and great at what they do. Best of all, I count all of them as friends. How awesome it is to work doing something you enjoy with your friends? I do want to add one more group to our team...those being our investors. Our investors believe in us and we want to make sure we are worthy of that belief. I don't just add our investors because I'm the CEO and its good form, it takes a lot to produce in this fast-moving world of high-tech. We are all one team working toward a common vision and that is why we are going to succeed. Now for Beta 2...
