• Read more about Intrideans in the Wild: from DC to Germany in One Weekend

This weekend we had Intrideans at four different events we sponsored from DC to Germany, talking about user experience, design, Ruby on Rails, and tablets. Here's a quick rundown of our experience at the events.

MoDevTablet

The first event kicked off early Friday morning. We partnered with GoMoDev to support their MoDevTablet event, and Jurgen, our Managing Director of UX, Christine Nakatani, our Director of Business Development, and Maggie, one of our superbly talented Project Managers spent the day talking with tablet developers and designers.

Jurgen and Maggie delivered a presentation to the MoDevTablet crowd later in the day on "Tablet as a Utility".

Using case studies from our work with Mitsubishi Electric, Agilysys, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, they were able to speak to the tablet's evolution into a tool for business. Now that businesses are using tablets as kiosks to speak to customers, sales tools to encourage customer purchases, and portable ordering devices for servers in hospitality it has become ever more important that designers pay attention to the user experience.

They iterate that as designers we have to look not only at what the client wants, but what the user-base needs, and how we can create apps that get out of the way and allow the user to accomplish business in an unobtrusive and helpful way. You'll find slides from their presentation on our community page and some photos of the event on our Flickr page.

MobileUXCamp DC

Elena Washington and Jurgen woke up bright and early Saturday morning and headed to the Goethe-Institut for MobileUXCamp.

We sponsor this event annually to help build a more innovative, forward-thinking community of developers and designers by giving mobile enthusiasts a forum for sharing ideas and knowledge. We always enjoy the presentations at this event and this year was no exception.

RailsGirlsDC

While Jurgen and Maggie were wowing the MoDevTablet crowd, Renae was flying from Portland, Maine to DC for the RailsGirlsDC event, which Intridea was sponsoring. We kicked off the event Friday night at the Living Social offices with an "installation party", where delicious and delicate cupcakes were provided, along with beer, wine and a nice spread of appetizers. We ended the party with a "#FridayHug".

Renae spent Saturday in the same office learning the basics of Ruby on Rails alongside 48 other girls. The event, organized by Liz Steininger, was the first of its kind in DC; however, RailsGirls events have been happening all over the world since the first one in Helsinki in 2010 attracted over 100 girls. RailsGirls aims to get more women interested in (and involved in) tech by offering a free, full-day course on Rails, exemplifying how easy it is to get applications up and running.

The attendees got their "Ideas" application off the ground, and for those who were more experienced spent the day adding more complex features to our apps. Renae added a commenting feature, the ability to upload additional pictures for individual ideas, and started adding user authentication. Coding was broken up into reasonable chunks of times, buffered by a fantastic round of lightning talks on everything from REST to SASS to TDD.

The most moving talk was from Maria Gutierrez, a software engineer at Living Social who told us how her love of software drove her to become an engineer. Explaining that software is involved in almost aspect of our lives, she stressed how important it is that more women are more involved in the creation of that software.

Each sponsor for RailsGirlsDC was asked to write a note to be read aloud to the class about why there were supporting the event. Renae felt really proud when Intridea's sponsor message received accolades and cheers from the crowd.

The tech community is one of the most vibrant, avant-garde ecosystems in today's world. And while women play vital roles in tech, we count far too few women among Rails developers. No community can call itself a success without fair representation and participation from the smartest minds across all genders, races, and cultural backgrounds.

That's why Intridea stands with you today in support of women in tech. We know the joy of writing your first line of code. We know the pride in seeing passing unit tests. We know the rush (and sometimes *terror*) one feels when pushing changes to production.

We're working to usher in a new generation of programmers in which men aren't the only dreamers and builders of our online future. Everyone, regardless of gender should have the opportunity to be part of the truly exciting and challenging world of software development.

Women, code on.

Smashing Conf

Chris Tate, our Director of UI and Ted O'Meara, our Director of UX touched down in Germany this weekend for Smashing Magazine's first conference, Smashing Conf.

The event kicked off this morning and brings together web designers and developers for three days of intense workshops and engaging presentations from industry experts around the world.

Chris and Ted are talking strategy with other designers and sending us updates of all the awesome things happening throughout the day. We'll be adding photos from the event to Flickr page and the guys will be sharing some of what they're learning on our blog after the event, so check back here this week for more updates.

If you were at these events or want to know more about the events, leave us a comment below. If you're interested in talking to us about your mobile or web strategy and would like to leverage our expertise in UX/UI design or Rails development, contact us today.

• Read more about The Tablet Frontier: MoDevTablet

Last April we sponsored the first MoDevUX event in Washington DC and helped facilitate some important conversations about user experience design and application development with hundreds of industry experts.

We had the opportunity to take the stage to share some of our insight gained from developing beautiful, modern mobile applications over the years. Our presentation garnered a lot of feedback and even landed us a story in InTheCapital, DC's leading online news source for tech and startups.

We're pleased to report MoDev is back in action this September with another mobile-themed conference, MoDevTablet; this round they will focus specifically on keeping pace in the tablet era.

We're excited to sponsor MoDevTablet alongside giants like Adobe, BlackBerry and Microsoft. The conference offers more than 60 workshops and presentations over three days from September 13th-15th.

Once again, Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX, and Anthony Nystrom, a Fellow at Intridea as well as our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technology, will take the stage. This time they'll be presenting "Tablet as a Utility", and will share case studies on developing tablet applications for real world, utilitarian cases where the functionality and design of the app has to enable someone to do their job more effectively. They will cover questions like:

• How does the design of these apps differ from the design of novelty tablet applications?
• What special cases do you need to take into consideration?
• How to keep tablet in use without Wifi?
• How to accommodate for working conditions like changes in light, differences in fingernails, and extended use?

We hope you'll join us for this exciting event in DC next week! Registration is still open. Several Intrideans will be there along with Jurgen and Anthony, so it will be a great time to pick our brains about your design and development strategy. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the event.

• Read more about Rails + Girls = A Better Rails Community

The Rails community has had its share of misogynistic debacles over the last several years. Dominated by male programmers (recent statistics suggest 94% of employed Rails programmers are male), the inroads to professional Rails development for females are not exactly accessible or welcoming.

Of course, it's not just the Rails community that lacks representation from women. When only 18% of the Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients in 2010 were female (Source - NCWIT.org) it's obvious there is a lack of female participation in the entire field of programming.

Though the speculation of why this has become a problem is varied, Rails Girls is a movement that's focusing on the more important part of the equation - solving it.

No community can be considered healthy without a balanced representation in gender and race. That's why at Intridea we're excited to sponsor Rails Girls DC, taking place September 14-15th at the Living Social offices in Washington, DC. We're supporting Rails Girls because we want to foster a healthier community - one where women are building their great ideas alongside men, in equal numbers and with equal opportunity.

Women can apply now to attend the free development workshops that are taking place around the world including Germany, Estonia, Spain, Belgium, and more. Additionally, Rails Girls has open sourced their guides to organizing these events, making it easy for Rails developers to change the shocking statistics that plague our community.

We're looking forward to being a part of this great event. Additionally, we're hiring Rails developers and women are encouraged to apply!

• Read more about Smashing Conf + Intridea

We’re excited to announce our involvement and sponsorship of Smashing Conference, taking place in beautiful Freiburg, Germany September 17-19th.

This event brings together web designers and developers for three days of intense workshops and engaging presentations from design experts around the world. We’re sponsoring the sold-out event and trekking to Germany for an epic “meeting of the minds.” (And some streusel. And beer. And sausages.)

Are you going to Smashing Conf? Be sure to come say “hallo”! Be on the lookout for these two dapper fellas:

We love talking about design and development and we’d love to hear your stories and share some of our own. If you didn’t get your ticket before the event sold out we’ll be tweeting updates from the event, so be sure to follow us and check back on our blog for a recap of the Smashing Conf highlights when we return!

See you in Germany!

• Read more about Vermont, Meet Ruby. Ruby, Meet Vermont.

I'll be spending the last weekend of July with passionate Ruby developers and pioneers in Burlington, Vermont - a small but charming city situated on the eastern shore of sparking Lake Champlain, and the perfect spot for Vermont's first Ruby conference, BURUCO.

Though this is a much anticipated retreat from the commotion of New York City (which is where I've been spending the majority of my time for the last several months), it's also an exciting opportunity for me to share some of the recent work I've been doing on spatial programming and location based apps.

I'm looking forward to sharing my knowledge, connecting with other developers, and learning from other giants in the community who are doing meaningful work. There will be interesting presentations from:

• Marc-Andre Cournoyer, author of "The 4 Hour Work Week For Ruby Hackers"
• Joshua Hull and Alex Maccaw of Twitter. I'm looking forward to learning more about Renee in Joshua's talk and getting an inside look at Spine, a JavaScript framework Alex wrote.
• Dan Croak from Thoughtbot who will be diving into Rails conventions.
• Scott Tadman, creator of PostageApp.com - a SaaS-based Email Delivery service for web apps - will be presenting on building asynchronous server applications with Ruby and Rails.
• Jen Myers of Relevance will be talking about the area where design and development intersect and how developers can leverage design principles to build better applications.
• Harold Gimenez who builds tools on top of Postgres all day long at Heroku and will be demonstrating its power and usefulness.
• Mark Bates, founder of Meta42 Labs, a Boston-based consultancy who will be presenting on testing JavaScript and CoffeeScript in Rails.

• Read more about A Day of Foster.ly

Have a great idea? Do you daydream about founding a startup? Do you have the entrepreneurial spirit but don't know how to kickstart your vision?

Then join us on May 12th at the Artisphere in Arlington, Va for "A Day of Foster.ly" - an engaging event led by DC, Maryland and Virginia entrepreneurs, designed to empower startups, visionaries, innovative students and other aspiring entrepreneurs like yourself with the resources and information needed to get started and to succeed.

The event kicks off with a morning Study Hall session, (Study Hall is a collaborative co-working environment for entrepreneurial-minded people) and follows with an Entrepreneurship Research Expo, informative panels and demos, mentorship sessions with Angel investors and an exciting keynote from Aneesh Chopra, the first Chief Technology Officer for the United States. Finish the night with a seriously good after party in the ballroom featuring live music from Two Car Living Room and FatBackDC DJs Philippe & Steven, and exclusive movie screenings.

For those of you who may be interested in the nuts and bolts of running a web development company you won't want to miss the 4:30 pm panel, "Development & Design" in which Jurgen Altziebler, Managing Director of UX at Intridea, will be discussing tactics and sharing personal stories alongside other local industry-leading moguls like nclud, Sisarina, Viget and Whitmoyer.

Tickets are selling quickly, but there are a limited number still available for A Day of Foster.ly. Register today and set your future as an entrepreneur in motion.

Intridea partnered with Foster.ly this year to help bring events like this to the growing community of entrepreneurs in the DC area. We're excited to be a part of the work that Foster.ly is doing and we're looking forward to talking with many of you about design, development and strategy at A Day of Foster.ly and future Foster.ly events.

• Read more about The DNA of Web and Mobile Products

Last week we sponsored MoDevUX, a mobile conference in Washington, D.C. led by vanguards in the mobile development and design industry. In addition to learning about emerging trends from the diverse crowd of presenters and attendees we also shared a bit of our own "secret sauce".

Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technologies, shared the stage with Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to tackle the topic of "Development and Design: When the Two Must Act As One".

Through cultivating a culture of quality in both design and development we've gained insights on the formula for success among teams of developers and designers. MoDevUX was an opportunity for us to share those insights with the greater mobile design and development communities.

Designoper, Developer or Designer, the point is that recognizing each other's skills while sharpening your select personal skills is what a team is built upon. Certainly there are stars, however stars don't scale but teams most certainly do! And like any business that is looking to grow, it must rely upon teams that are less interested in their personal prowess and more interested in their unified presence.

Great Products: Under the Hood

If you're building a product you already know that it's important to know your industry, understand your users, define a clear vision and path of execution, and to be bold in your approach. But what role does your team of developers and designers play in the overall viability of your product?

We believe the DNA of any mobile or web product is embedded in the team(s) that are executing on the vision. Ultimately, every product is really just someone's good idea made accessible by teams of programmers and designers. Therefore, the most important factor in the success of your product is the team of experts building it. At Intridea we've been honing the process of creating these teams for years, and with great success! We do it in large part by making sure our teams of developers and designers are working together, not autonomously.

Building a Design & Development Team

Often, design teams work in isolation from development teams and in many cases design is outsourced to other agencies while development is done in-house or vice versa. But there's no doubt about it, a great product experience is the direct result of a good working relationship between the teams building the functionality (the developers) and the teams creating the aesthetic experience on top of that core functionality (the designers).

Of course, simply knowing that designers and developers should work hand-in-hand doesn't mean it's going to be easy. After all, designers and developers are different breeds and both groups work in distinctly mysterious ways. The trick to building solidarity in a product team is to hire the right kind of people in the first place.

While you might be inclined to seek out "rockstars" for your team, keep in mind that superheroes get bored easily, they're hard to find, and they don't scale. We have found that it's more advantageous to focus on hiring specialists who meet these requirements:

• Have the skills (and attention span) to see a project all the way through (even that last 10%)
• Are great at a couple of core things but are eager to learn beyond the bounds of their specialty (i.e., beware of "backend" developers who refuse to do "frontend" work)
• Leave evangelism to theocrats: you want people who aren't afraid to use different technologies (whether they're cutting-edge technologies or older technologies that just happen to be the right tool for the job). Find people who love the challenge of creating something incredible regardless of the tools and processes used to get there.
• Value form as much as function. It's important to see the inherent value in both a well-architected application and an easy-to-use, beautiful user interface.

In a symbiotic designer/developer relationship, both sides will, at some point, be faced with setting aside ingrained methodologies in order to collaborate effectively. What's actually happening in those cases is something like this: designers are learning something new about practice patterns in development, and developers are learning something new about user flow and experience from designers. When designers and developers work together in such a way, both teams gain something and will be more agile, productive and innovative on future projects.

Setting the Team Up For Success

Managing a product team is generally no easy task. Ask the design team to work in collusion with the programmers and it's sure to get even more challenging. Jurgen shared his strategy for creating a "balanced" team and setting them up for success on any project.

• Team Building: This is an important first step. Assign an internal project (maybe a redesign of your company's website) to a developer and a designer. In this situation they will have to manage the project together, understand how the other one works, communicate in-depth about scope, features, and blockers on the project, and deliver a finished product.
• Field Testing: Once you've ensured that the designer and developer can work together, pair them on a mid-sized client project. This adds a bit of necessary pressure because client deadlines are often more strenuous than internal deadlines. Additionally, a client project will introduce more variables for both sides. They'll have to think about things like client expectations, changes in scope and direction for both UI and architecture, and more.
• Heavy Lifting: Now your designer and developer are battle-hardened and ready to lead the troops. Appoint this dev/design duo as the lead for larger projects that have multiple designers and developers. Their experience will aid them in helping other designers and developers work together, maximizing the results of the process.

But I Just Want A Good Product That Will Be Profitable

You have an idea. You need a product built. It sounds easy enough. Do you really need to spend all this time thoughtfully building the team behind the product?

In short, yes. Great products fail all the time; and not because there wasn't a good idea behind it. They fail because the teams building the products couldn't meet at that magic place - the precipice of awesome. (No, really - amazing things happen when designers and developers work together closely!)

Keep in mind, there isn't a lot of room for failure, especially in the mobile app market where users are educated and discerning and the competition is cutthroat. It's not even that users are "demanding" sexy interfaces and well-built applications - we're beyond that. Today, users just expect it. And if your product doesn't meet expectations your users won't even complain about it - they'll simply move on to another application that does it better.

These are problems that you rarely see when you have a team of designers and developers working closely on a product because simple issues like awkward user flow, unintended behavior within the interface, and architecture miscalculations are caught more frequently and earlier on in the process.

The Secret is in the Sauce

So there you have it - a sampling of our "secret sauce". TLDR: Hire smart people who value quality and aren't afraid to cross the "party lines".

Be sure to go through the complete slide deck from our presentation at MoDevUX, and check out our portfolio where you'll get to see some great examples of recent products and solutions built by our teams of designers and developers! Additionally, the full set of photos from the event is available on our Flickr page.

Do you have insights on helping designers and developers work together on projects? We'd love to hear it. Did you see our presentation at MoDevUX? We want to know what you thought. Leave your feedback below or reach out to us on Twitter.

• Read more about The Mobile Frontier: MoDevUX

This month we're sponsoring MoDevUX and joining pioneers in mobile design and development at an event created to focus specifically on user experience and design for mobile.

Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile & Emerging Technologies will be joined by Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to talk about accessibility to big data through enhanced design and interface layers on mobile devices.

MoDevUX will feature keynotes from visionaries at Frog, XOBNI, and Capital One. The three-day event will kick off with a day of workshops, a full day of presentations from some of the brightest people in the industry, and end with a hackathon, complete with demos and awards.

We're looking forward to this Homeric meeting of the minds. You can join us by registering today!

• Read more about Intrideans Headed to Shanghai for RubyConfChina 2011

November is shaping up to be one of our busiest months for events. This week our design team is in NYC for The Future of Web Design; Ted O'Meara will be in Baltimore next weekend to support Education Hack Day; Michael Bleigh just landed in NYC after presenting at Ruby Midwest, and he, along with all the Senior Partners, will be jetting off to China in two days to meet the Intridea East team in Shanghai for RubyConfChina and then to HangZhou to attend the first Intridea East retreat.

We're sponsoring RubyConfChina for the second year, and it's sure to be a great event; Matz, the "father of Ruby" will be in attendance, among 500 other developers and Ruby enthusiasts from China and beyond. Michael will be presenting a new talk:

Crushing Complacency: Reinvention and Software Development:

When developing software it's easy to allow yourself to become stagnant. Too easily we stop learning, stop revolutionizing, stop questioning because what we have is "good enough." Learn why and how a philosophy of constant competition -- with yourself -- can make you a better developer building better software. With examples from open source, polyglot programming, business, and life, this session will delve into how to keep yourself scrappy, young, and eternally hungry for better.

Michael's talk will take place directly after Matz's opening keynote. Later in the afternoon, Ping (Partner and Director of Asian Operations at Intridea) and Daniel (a Senior Engineer at Intridea living in Shanghai) are presenting "OSS and Startups" to the RubyConfChina attendees. Their talk will focus on tackling the challenges of profit through an OSS business model.

Be sure to check back next week for photos from RubyConfChina, the retreat, and presentation notes from Michael! And make sure you're following us on Twitter - it's a great way to get current information about open positions, open source announcements, event sponsorships, presentation materials, and more.

• Read more about Education Hack Day - Applications for Education

This November, a crowd of pioneering programmers will gather at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore to create applications that provide solutions to teachers, students and schools.

The American Education system is a large, complex structure. It is often targeted as a system that desperately needs improvement, yet its proportion makes is seem impenetrable and unchangeable. As technology advances schools struggle to keep up. Teachers work to find ways to use technology on their own to improve their systems locally and to reach students in more modern and relevant ways.

If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow. -- John Dewey

Education Hack Day brings teachers and technologists together to create smart solutions to today's education-related problems. Developers will create applications from ideas that are being crowdsourced from local teachers and administrators.

Imagine an app that automatically calls a parent when a student is marked as absent to let them know their child isn’t in school. Something like this could be built in a weekend and could help curb truancy.

--Education Hack Day

Ted O'Meara, a Project Manager and User Interface Designer at Intridea will be at the event. He will be working on an open source BoardMaker-type application called Boardspeak that can be used by Speech Therapists working with individuals on speech rehabilitation, as well as assisting other populations facing cognitive impairments. Ted, who is also a grad student in the Human-Centered Computing Program at UMBC is no stranger to the relationship between education and technology. He continually looks for ways that usable, well-designed software can solve problems for others. Most recently, he has been working on CogConnect, a mobile rehabilitation application for stroke patients.

Other developers will be working on a cloud-based registrar, a large-scale student management package, a homework notifier app for parents, a Parent/Teacher conference scheduling application, converting science animations from Flash to HTML5 so teachers can show them to students on iPads, an application to aggregate information about literary events taking place in the area, among many other applications that address the emerging needs of educators in this mobile age.

Education Hack Day is the brain-child of Mike Brenner, a luminary in the Baltimore tech scene who has played a part in other ventures like Refresh Bmore and Startup Baltimore. Mike hopes the teams that create applications will go on to become sustainable product companies:

Our goal as event organizers is to provide the facility, the fuel (food + drinks), and the resources needed to creatively solve these problems. We also are working hard to make sure that the weekend doesn’t just end on Sunday. We want big companies and angel investors to reward our small teams and incentivise their continued progress through seed investments and pro-bono business development.

--Education Hack Day

We're proud to sponsor this event and we're anxious to see the applications that will be created and what kind of impact they have. You can help by adding your own ideas for applications, commenting and voting on existing ideas, or by sponsoring the event!