TeamworkPM’s Engine Room

Hi guys,

I’m Billy the billing guy, funnily enough. I joined the team here a little over a year ago and I'm loving it here. I’ve been friends with the guys for far too long but we work quite well together amidst the gentle ribbing. I was a class mate of Adrian, whom you met last month while studying for a Business Degree here in Cork. I then met the rest of the gang through him.

After college I spent a couple of years helping out with my family’s small construction business in County Kerry (nicest place in the world IMHO).
From there I moved to an Accountancy practice back in Cork City where I spent three years working with a wide range of business, everything from Agriculture to Tech Start Ups. I’m still on the road towards becoming a CPA, I’m nearly nearly there.
The experience I gained within the practice and family business showed me how important proper organisation within a company was towards the success or failure a business.

The great thing about TeamworkPM is the input we all have in the product’s development. My suggestions and comments are always taken on board; they might be thrown back at me sometimes but are always considered first!

What Do I Do Here?

Firstly I’m responsible for the everyday financial aspect of the Company, accounts, payroll payable and receivables, the usual mundane, yet highly important, stuff.
As far as the product itself is concerned, I look after the billing queries, and as much customer feedback as I’m equipped to answer (not a lot!). I also try and weigh in with Sam in Marketing & Sales with sales analysis, tracking our pricing, costs etc.
Most importantly I get the coffees in to keep the developers ticking over :-)

Tools I Use

• Dell XPS L702X laptop…it’s an animal and I love it
• HP Desktop machine in the office
• iPhone 4S…never leave anywhere without it, probably my most important device
  

Applications I can’t do without.

• MS Office 2010…I live in Excel, it’s ridiculous how much abuse I take for my love of spreadsheets.
• HipChat
• LogMeIn…both web app and iPhone
• SageAccounts
• Dropbox…brilliant if you want to work from home
• HelpScout & LiveSupport
• TeamworkPM…couldn’t get out of bed without it

Outside of the office

I’ve been married to Sharon since 2008, we live just outside Cork city in Carrigtohill with our twin Sheepdogs.
I’m a big sports fan; Rugby, GAA (Our National sports), athletics, some soccer, basically any sport, I would even watch two flys running up a wall if it was on skysports. I really love golf but the feeling isn’t mutual.
Aside from that I’m an avid reader, politics and history are big favourites. I love movies, I could talk movies for days on end, actually Dan and I often do.

So that’s pretty much me. I look forward to talking to and working with you all, but not until August the 7th as I’m off to Central America for my summer holidays. Anyone floating around Guatemala or Honduras for the next couple of weeks is welcome to drop me a line, we’ll have a cerveza o dos.

Hi, my name is Adrian Kerr and I look after support here at TeamworkPM. I have known most of the guys here for over 10 years, so when the opportunity to join TeamworkPM arose I was delighted to come on-board. I joined the company in February and I’m thoroughly enjoying being part of the team. It is great to be working with a company who are so customer-focused and passionate about their product. 

 

I can’t say I’m as tech savvy as the others here, in fact my technical skills pale in comparison to the others here (nerds!). My background has had more to do with customer service; in College I studied Commerce and achieved a Major in Law and a Minor in IT. In recent years I studied to become a life and business coach.

I am very customer orientated and thrive when helping people. I've had past experience dealing in customer support and sales within the motor and software industries.

A Day in the Job

• Arrive around 8am at our local 'Costa Coffee' where the team meets up for a chat (All TeamworkPM related of course).
• Drive to the office, start up our website live support chat. The chat allows you to contact me directly through the www.teamworkpm.net website  – it’s the little button in the bottom right of the page.
• Answer all the outstanding feedback, all good of course :-) 
• Throughout the day I occasionally update the FAQ section of our site with any new questions that we hadn't covered yet.
• When I have time, I help the guys here test and tweak the latest amazing updates that are coming soon!

Tools that I use

• My MacBook Air - Love it, it’s my first Mac and I’m not going back :-)
• iPhone - always in my hand

Software preferences

• HipChat - we use it in the office for all our internal and mobile chats
• TeamworkPM - I should know how to use it :-)
• XBox - I am the FIFA king in the office. We have an office lunchtime league.
• Twitter - I like to see what’s going on

Other Interests and Hobbies

In my spare time I enjoy nothing more than being outdoors; whether kayaking, playing golf, tennis, walking or running.

I am an avid Rugby fan and would still love to be playing but unfortunately given injuries incurred, I’ve decided to called it a day. However, I can be found most weekends watching some form of it and occasionally I even try to teach my 3 year old son how to play (but alas with mixed results).

So that's me. Delighted to introduce myself to you all. If you want to get in touch, you can find me by submitting feedback or getting in touch on the live chat. I'll be eagerly awaiting to speak to more of you, our wonderful users, very soon.

Hi there,

My name is Mike and I'd like to introduce myself as the newest member of TeamworkPM. I've been around Teamwork for quite a while helping out on the iOS app as necessary. However the lads decided to put a big push behind mobile apps and I've been here full time for the last two months or so.

At 38 I'm a bit older than the rest of the guys at Teamwork.  So instead of an XBox I started messing around on an Oric 1 (google it).  It didn't do a whole lot and died within weeks, but it did have Zap and Ping as BASIC keywords and that got me hooked.  After that I was always messing with some computer or other.  At one point Myself and a friend somehow managed to convince Atari to give us some pre-production Falcon030's and set about creating the World's-Greatest-Application-Framework.  All written in 68K assembly.  It was about as successful as the Falcon itself.

After College, I went straight to work for Apple - it was a brand new department and we were all around the same age, so not only did we learn loads but we had a ball doing it.  Steve, however, didn't like having developers where he couldn't see them. The department was shut and I couldn't convince my soon-to-be wife to move to California.  My tan would be forevermore restricted to two weeks a year.

After that I spent a couple of years working on localisation tools for indie developers and freelance translators.  While that led to some oddities ( practically all of the open source software in Vietnam was translated using my software! ) it was no Instagram.  It did however teach me the value of listening to your customers - a whole section that I added as a favour for one particular client ended up being the most popular feature overall.

Not long after that Apple brought out the iPhone and finally - finally! - my parents could understand what I did!

Outside of work, my Family take up all of my time.  We have two kids and they're at that age where they're great fun but there's not a whole lot of rest to be had in our house!  The highlight of the family week is when we all get together to make the homemade pizza.  My daughter becomes the DJ and my son makes these mad little 1 inch wide minis.  It's good fun.

Odd stuff that the Teamwork guys probably don't know:  I'm not a GAA (Irish Sport) person, but at under-age level I did captain a Waterford team with both Paul Flynn and Tony Browne on it (That'll mean nothing to people outside of Waterford.  And if you're outside of Ireland: Hurling is the best sport in the world : obviously!).  Odd part time jobs:  I was a Milk Man all through school and college, I spent some time doing Wedding and GAA Videos to help out a Friends business. I was one of the main characters in a bigish budget short movie (don't ask).  And I've been lucky enough to present at WWDC twice.

Tools that I use.

Sublime Text  - Multiple cursors is Pure Genius.

Alfred - I'm a recent convert from Quicksilver and I love it.  Sit me down at a Mac without at least one of these installed and I feel like I'm missing some fingers.

XCode - Obviously.

git - once you start using git, you can go back to svn.

Terminal - for 90% of stuff it's simply faster and easier to use git from the terminal.

Spotify - I nearly always work with music on in the background.

Airfoil - Great for sending Spotify to the speakers connected to the AppleTV

WindowKeys - Allows me to Move and resize windows via a hotkey.  It's great for moving between screens too.

HipChat - How we communicate in the office

Dash - Extremely fast and efficient documentation viewer.  Great for iOS but supports Javascript, Ruby and plenty more.  Very nice.

Twitter - !

Magic Trackpad - I prefer using the keyboard as much as possible ( hence Alfred ) so it's nice that the trackpad just sits there in the same place, unlike a mouse.

 

Of course I use my iPhone and iPad every day as well so :

Paper - makes even my scrawls look presentable.

Bamboo Stylus - I liked Paper so much I went out and bought a good stylus.

Adobe Ideas - I actually don't like the UI.  But I do like its fast zooming - perfect for writing down ideas with the Bamboo..

Zite - the best thing about this app is that it pulls out great articles that I never would have found otherwise.

And finally, I don't actually use any of the UI mocking apps.  I've bought nearly all of them, but I find they're usually just too clumsy. Go detailed and they're not that much better than Interface builder.  Go vague and they're not as good as Paper.

 

I live and breath what I do.  The Teamwork guys do to and that's why I came to work here.  I think you'll enjoy the stuff coming down the line for TeamworkPM.

Hi,

Donal here! I'm 22 years old, live in the hills of Cork City. I love programming, music and design. I am one of the three developers here at TeamworkPM HQ. I joined the crew back in June straight out of university after doing work experience with them the previous summer. This was back when the lads were still involved in web consultancy.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to do my work experience in an area of computer science which interests me so much. I thoroughly enjoyed the six months I spent working with them and that hasn't changed.

Going further back..

My interest in computers, programming and the web stems from a lot of different places. For one, my father worked for a company who made components for macintosh computers (pre Jobs v2 and iEverything), so there has always been a computer in the house.  It being a mac there were not many games that I could play, so I had to actively find ways to entertain myself on it.

So most of my time was spent tinkering and doing things like making very short animations using Corel Draw and QuickTime. Later on- around the time I got broadband I became interested in how the web works. I started making websites using Microsoft word, then moved on to dreamweaver and later to learn the w3c's xHTML and CSS standards.

Before college I hadn't written one line of code (bar failed attempts at writing applescript scripts) but i quickly became hooked on all things PHP and JavaScript after having an excellent professor in first year.

In my free time I'm usually playing music around the place. My musical past and present consists of playing trumpet in a marching band and an orchestra, singing in a choir and later teaching myself to play the guitar and bass. I currently play bass guitar in a couple of bands. 

Some of the areas of Teamwork I am responsible for include:

• Teamwork Mobile
• All Tasks v2
• The API
• Search v2
• BlinkSale integration
• General maintenance

 

Tools I use for Development:

• Alienware Auora + 3 * 27" monitors
• Sublime Text 2
• Adobe Photoshop
• Navicat for MYSQL
• TeamworkPM =]
• TortoiseSVN
• IETester
• iPad
• iPod Touch
• Galaxy S2 - currently flashed with Ressurection Remix Pro
• Blackberry Bold 9900
• W7 Phone Emulator
• Cutters Choice
• PrototypeJS
• Sugarjs

Now, I am new here so I don't want to keep you.  I look forward to answering some of your feedback and helping the rest of the the team make Teamwork the best online PM solution digitally possible!

Continuing our Meet the Team campaign, this month it's Sam's turn to come out from his office,  and say "Hello" to you all...

I have spoken to a lot of you either on the phone or over emails so I thought it would be nice if you all got to know a little more about me, so you can put a face to name...

I’m 32 years old, originally from New Zealand but have been living here in Ireland for the last 16 years. My family and I moved over here back in the early 90’s as my Dad was coaching rugby in Ireland. We moved around quite a bit, even going back to NZ for two years during this time as well.
Eight years ago they decided to move back in NZ for good but I decided to stay on as I had met a girl while at college, whom I have since married and we now have a two-year-old son Ryan, plus I was starting up a business as well filming rugby and other events.

Over the next few years the filming was going well apart from one major problem I ran into which was that customers only wanted me to do the work, and they didn't want other people I hired in to help with the load, as my experience with rugby meant I filmed the game really well and understood more about what they were looking for. This meant it was impossible for my business to expand in any way which was not a great outcome.

I met Dan a few years before while playing rugby back with a team while in our twenties. We didn’t really have much to do with each other until I moved my office into the same building as himself and Peter were already working in. The three of us would then often meet in the coffee shop below and chat and share ideas. In fact, we probably drank more coffee than we did actual work. Then in 2004 the three of us acted on one of the ideas and opened an Internet gaming cafe called AREA51. We were the first dedicated PC gaming café in Ireland open 24 hours a day. I gave up my other business to focus on this and Dan and Peter were able to continue in Digital Crew while working part time in A51.

Over the next five years we experienced both amazing highs and some soul crushing lows. The main advantage we had over our competition in Cork city was our customer management. We worked really hard to build customer loyalty, simple things like remembering customers names, talking and joking with customers, employing staff that knew and loved games. Then every Tuesday night the three of us would stay late and play against our customers joining in on all the banter and smack talk, this all helped us to build a really loyal customer base.

Joining the Crew

By 2007 the third founding member of Digital Crew had decided to leave and head over to Australia to persure other work. Dan and Peter then asked me if I would like to come on board and help pick up the sales role with Digital Crew. I accepted.
I have always had an interest in technology, web sites and web apps so it didn’t take me too long to get up to speed with what the guys had to offer. Sales went really well and business picked up. This was also the start of TeamworkPM being developed. So as consultancy sales picked up, it put more pressure on the guys to keep up with the extra workload on top of developing TeamworkPM, but they managed. The increase in sales also gave us the ability to hire in more staff so we could begin to focus on TeamworkPM fulltime.
As TeamworkPM got bigger and required more staff, I began to move into a customer support role helping customers out with a variety of issues from billing, to payments to general ‘how do I do this?’ questions. The other role which I have now moved into is marketing.

My Day

Once Ryan wakes up we’re all up (anywhere from 6:30am - 8:00am) The first thing I do is check sales on my phone from the night before.
I get Ryan dressed and sort him and myself out for breakfast. Then my wife Emma takes over so I get dressed and check emails.

EDIT: Since I wrote this post a while ago thing have become slightly more manic in the mornings. I now have a daughter, Zoe added to the mix as well so this really makes mornings pretty full on :-)

Once everyone is feed and watered and I have managed to shower and get out the door,  I then get in the car and head to work. Normally I listen to Mixergy podcasts while I drive in. I love the show and it's given me loads of ideas over the years. If you love business, startups and being inspired then you have got to listen to this show.

I drive to Costa coffee where I grab my morning coffee and go about answering all the feedback from the night before as well as direct emails that have come in.
Once my laptop runs out of power I head up the road to the office where I spend the day answering more emails that come in, feedback from our support tool and the occasional skype or phone call. A fair chunk of my day involves online meeting and demonstrations to people interested in learning the more advanced aspects of Teamwork.
I also look after all payment related issues such as failed payments or users that need to be invoiced instead of paying online as well.

I also try to set time aside for getting the TeamworkPM name out there. I read through blogs and post comments where and when it’s appropriate. I look for opportunities in which we can advertize as well as organize any sponsoring of events that we can do.

Being the only one on the team who is not a developer has it’s ups and downs. I try to give my ideas and feedback on new features from a "normal" users point of view. One of the big advantages I feel we have over competition is the speed at which Dan, Peter and the rest of the development team can roll out updates. This also makes my job a lot easier and also allows me to deliver good news to customers often.
There is nothing better than getting feedback from a user about something they feel is missing in the app. If I think the user is making a valid point that needs attention on our part I bring this up with either Dan or Peter and they make the change either that day or during the week. I then go back to the customer and they are amazed at how fast we rolled it out and delighted that we do actually listen and make the appropriate changes.

EDIT: March 2013 - I have just moved back to New Zealand to open and operate a TeamworkPM office over here. This move will help us give our customers support and help around the clock.

What I use in work.

Computers

• MacBook Pro Retina with 27 inchThunderbolt display
• iPhone 4
• iPad

Software

• TeamworkPM - Obviously ;-)
• Hipchat - office communication
• Dropbox - all my files are saved here so I can access them from anywhere
• Woopra - tracking people live on the website
• SEO MOZ - tracking SEO and rankings in search engines across countries
• Tweet Deck -  tracking search terms across twitter, posting tweets
• Twitter - on the iPhone and iPad
• FireFox - browser of choice
• Screen Flow - making screen recording
• Google alerts - tracking what is being said about us as well as others online
• Google analytics - tracking users to the site
• Adroll - loving this new company. Really easy to set up retargeting ads

 
Well that’s all I guess, I hope this gives you a small insight into who I am and what I do at TeamworkPM.

If you have any questions about me or anything at all about Teamwork feel free to get in touch. You can also read about Dan and Peter.

Continuing our Meet the Team campaign, this month it's Dan's turn to crawl out from his programming pit, blink wildly at the bright sun and say "Hello" to you all...

 

Many of you may have conversed with me over the last few years so I better introduce myself formally....

I'm 32 years young, married 7 months and live in the beautiful Irish countryside in Co. Cork. I love programming and Teamwork is one of the biggest parts of my life. 

Every waking moment is spent thinking about the product, the programming, our customers and future features.

When I was young, my father dragged home a Wang IBM PC (286) from work and there began my foray into computers. Nintendo's were not something we had as kids and while everyone was busy playing the latest video games, I had my head buried in Basic manuals trying to create my own games on the sly while avoiding homework.

The 286 progressed to a 386 and I progressed to Turbo Pascal. My games were rubbish but the sense of achievement was massive. It felt like I was changing the world, even though the only people I had to show were my sisters. That all changed when I met Peter in college. We decided we were going to build games. He was the first person I met that had the same enthusiasm as myself and to top it off was a damn good programmer. We used to have competitions such as who could make the best 2D tile based engine using C++ and DirectX (3!). Peter won ;-)

That was 12 years ago and we're still working together. The aim of the game has changed but we are just as passionate about Teamwork now as we were back then trying to create games!

Peter filled in the early days of our consulting company Digital Crew (See Peter's meet the team entry) so I won't delve too much in to that but I will say that it has been the best learning curve ever. Every single feature or decision in Teamwork is based on the 12 years of experience we have built up working on large scale be-spoke applications. While alot has changed since we started web development, the principles are solid.

My role in Teamwork is also lead developer. Peter and myself work closely with each other building new features. Sometimes we take a whole section each, sometimes one starts a feature and the other improves it. The Calendar is a good example of pair-programming. I started the feature, spending weeks of sleepless nights as Timezone issues and event spanning issues plagued me. It took a few hours of Peter's fresh eyes to fix the problem areas.

Some of the areas of Teamwork I am responsible for include:

• Desktop Timer App (Flex)
• Diff-ing of Notebook versions (Java)
• Reply by email (Brain juice)
• Email Dropboxes (C# connector)
• Resource's section
• Markdown support (Java)

I use multiple different programming languages. It's a case of the best tool for the job. In Teamwork, there is ColdFusion, Java, C#, Javascript and for the desktop apps Flex. I enjoy a programming challenge and once you have a good grasp of programming fundamentals, you can pick up any language and produce some good work.

Some of the things I'm working on right now which I shouldn't tell you about:

• Dropbox integration - I really enjoyed the challenge in this and officially know the Dropbox API inside out
• Android App - It's early days but I'm making progress - Please don't ask ;-)

In my spare time I enjoy reading. I especially enjoy books on tech companies, some of my favourites include:

• Master of Doom (The id software story)
• The Perfect Store (The ebay story)
• The Paypal Wars (The paypal story)

I'm also a movie fanatic and a bit of a Mac fan boy ;-)

Most of my spare time goes towards "challenge programming" where I pick some area of interest and muck about with it. Most of our fun recreational hacking turns into real features in Teamwork! The great thing about my job is that it's also my hobby! I actually get great satisfaction out of programming for pleasure. 

I also like to answer feedback. While Sam is the main face to our customers, I read every single feedback item that comes in. I think it's extremely important for the developers of an app to engage with customers and see the pain points people have with a product. Also, if it's a support issue a developer is in a much better position to advise on a solution to a problem. (Invariably we create the problems ;-))

With the rise in smartphones, and email always available, there is no excuse for a feedback email to be left un-answered. We all have iPhones and iPads. I always like to think of it as if I am the person requiring answers, what would I expect from support. While working on our Dropbox integration I was on the receiving end of super-fast answers to my questions and I liked it. It gives you a good feeling about the product, company or service you are interacting with.

One thing I always like (kinda voyeurism) when reading about a developer is finding out what tools they use, so here's mine:

Office Computer(s):

• 3 x 19 inch screens
• Dell with duel-processor and 3GB RAM
• Large screen iMac for testing our wares on Mac

Software

• Homesite as an editor
• Navicat for MySQL
• Flex Builder 4.5.1 for AIR apps and Visual Studio for C# work
• Teamwork Project Manager (In a custom tabbed shell I made)
• Hipchat (for inter-office communication)
• Dropbox and SVN for sharing code between machines
• IE8 & Chrome mainly

At home I have an Alienware Beast with 16gb RAM, SSD drive and 1 gig GFX card. I like to game! Currently playing Call of Duty: Black Ops and waiting for Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3.

That's all for now! If you have any questions on anything above, can relate to me in any way or just want to throw a curve ball question, don't be shy! Ask me in the comments and I'll reply ASAP.

We are going to make more of an effort to show you behind the scenes here at TeamworkPM HQ. As part of this initiative, we are going to introduce you to each of the team members. First up is Digital Crew Founder and Lead Developer Peter Coppinger...

OK, over to you Peter... tell us a little about your background...

Hi All, it's good to introduce myself and come out of my programming dungeon office for some air...

I'm 32, live in Cork City, Ireland and I love my job. In fact I started programming on a commodore 64 back in the day when I was just 8. At 10 years old I was inspired when reading about good old Bill Gates and even then I knew that I wanted to make amazing software with a like-minded team of great developers.

I co-founded Digital Crew over 11 years ago. For many years we were a small web consultancy and we completed hundreds of content managed websites for small and medium sized companies. We transitioned to developing powerful web applications for multinational clients.

About 3 years ago we decided that we needed to get more organised and so we searched for an online project management application. What we found dismayed us and so that summer while visiting my sister in Boston for a few weeks, I set about creating TeamworkPM. I programmed version 1.0 on my lonesome sitting on my sisters sofa in the sweltering heat. TeamworkPM has come a long way since that version 1.0 and we have learnt a lot in the progress. I thoroughly enjoy getting down and dirty with both the code, database and interface design.

I love making great software for you and I'm more motivated by your positive feedback and the satisfaction of a job well done than I ever will be by money.

 

So what do you work on each day...

I'm responsible for developing the TeamworkPM codebase and keeping everything running efficiently. We have a rule that bugs must be fixed before any new features are added so every day I come to work and check the bug list. We typically try to clear the list of small and large bugs before moving on to feature development. When any bugs are cleared, I turn to the roadmap, pick the most important task and I get stuck in. 

I also spend a lot of time optimising TeamworkPM so that everything is nice and fast. I check logs for slow queries, add indexes and optimise them and implement caching mechanisms that allow us to scale and provide a better, faster experience. We believe that speed is an important feature for TeamworkPM.

Finally we're a small team so we are all stay involved in answering your feedback and marketing TeamworkPM.

 

What are you working on today?