Over the last couple months we’ve been busy tying up loose ends and preparing for our first “official” company-wide retreat. Even though we’re a fully distributed team, we’re big believers in the power of meet-ups and face-time. They form bonds, build trust, and create a level of personal understanding that can’t be replicated online.
Our last full company meet-up was over a year and a half ago at DjangoCon US. We celebrated by hosting a party at Portland’s favorite retro-arcade, Ground Kontrol). It was an awesome experience and for some of our team, it was their first time seeing each other in person. As great as it was, we all felt like the conference schedule got in the way of our limited time together.
The Place
We decided our next meet-up would be a full-fledged retreat and for the last year, we’ve been kicking ...
2012 was another amazing year at Lincoln Loop. I’m incredibly proud of the work we accomplished and the growth and development we’ve made as a company. A few of the highlights:
We launched our first product, Ginger. It is a critical to the way we do business at Lincoln Loop, allowing us to have meaningful discussions even when we’re not all online.
We worked with some amazing clients, including Evite, RedBeacon, National Geographic, and GamesRadar.com.
We expanded our skill set into rich JavaScript applications with Backbone.js, server configuration with Chef and Salt, and even some services in Node.js and Go
We sponsored DjangoCon US and became corporate sponsors of the Python Software Foundation
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our premium screencast collection, Learn with Lincoln Loop. Over the years we’ve worked with a wide variety of technologies and techniques. With Learn, we’re making that accumulated knowledge available through high-quality, DRM-free training videos.
We plan to release more videos in the months ahead, covering a variety of topics for web developers. Each video will be about 20 to 30 minutes long, and will include notes and links to related resources.
The first two videos cover Spotting Performance Problems in your Django application and Syncing Backbone.js with Django. Upcoming videos will feature deployment from simple to complex, configuration management, Django project structure, and more.
We’d love to hear your feedback or ideas about Learn. Join us in #lincolnloop on Freenode, send a tweet our way @lincolnloop, or email us at info@lincolnloop.com. If you’d like ...
Today we’re introducing a new member of the Lincoln Loop family, BotBot.me. At the moment, BotBot is beautiful hosted IRC logs (try #django or #go-nuts). We built it for people who love IRC and we want your advice to improve it.
We see BotBot becoming our personal chatroom assistant. He looks things up for you, he sends you reminders, he delivers messages to people when they aren’t available. Our initial focus has been having him remember the chatroom history and tell you what happened while you were away. He’s a replacement for your bouncer with a friendly web interface.
We’ve been happy users of Freenode’s IRC services for our company chat for years (we tried web-based chat services, but they never stuck). Recently, Github’s hubot inspired us to make our chat room better. Being the eternal tinkerers that we are, we decided to ...
It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything here about Lincoln Loop, so it’s time for a quick update.
In short, we’ve been hard at work. In addition to having multiplespeakers at DjangoCon, and starting work on an internal project, our team also launched two big client development projects:
GamesRadar is a high-traffic gaming review site with lots of social features
Evite Postmark is a web application for building premium online invitations and correspondences
With these two big initiatives launched, for the first time in almost a year, our team has availability for new client work.
We’re now on the lookout for the next great project to take on. Our ideal project would be one that lets us focus on our strong points: remote development, in an agile manner, using Django and Python. We typically look for long-term engagements (more than 3 months) that ...
I’m pleased to announce that Gondola for Real Estate, our GeoDjango-backed real estate CMS is publicly accepting new customers. A couple weeks ago, we quietly re-launched gondolacms.com with some details about the platform and what it has to offer, as well as some sites that have been built on it over the last few months.
History
A couple of years ago, we were building websites for some local real estate agents and realized that what they wanted couldn’t be shoehorned into the popular CMS frameworks available at the time. Somewhat reluctantly, we set out to reinvent a CMS that met their needs written in Django. Eventually, the client-specific bits were extracted and Gondola was created. It has been under the radar for the last few months while we tweaked the system with a small group of early adopters and it is to the point now where we ...
Today, we are launching a new offering at Lincoln Loop, development services paid by the sprint. Previously, our typical engagements involved a (sometimes lengthy) discovery, estimation, and bidding process. Lately, however, people have been asking us to jump in with both feet and help them get started immediately. For those people, we think paying for services on a sprint-by-sprint basis will be a great option.
At the beginning of every sprint, you’ll provide us with a prioritized list of user stories, features, or tasks that are to be completed. Our team then dives into the project for a 2 week long focused burst of work. Our goal is to complete as much of that list as possible in the time allotted for the sprint. For development work, that means fully-tested features ready for production. During the sprint, we can provide not only our expertise in Python and Django, but ...
Lincoln Loop has been in “head down” mode for the last couple months. In addition to being knee deep in client projects, we have grown from a one-man development studio to a full-fledged Django development shop/consultancy. We are proud to announce that Lincoln Loop is the first (that we know of) company focusing solely on Django application development. Our development team is currently five strong and oozing with talent. Each member contributes to the community in blog posts or open source add-ons; a few of us have contributed code to Django itself. More on our dev team in the near future.
We went through the typical growing pains during the transition, but the kinks are worked out and we can officially say that we are open for business. Django projects big and small, send them our way. Our devs can handle nearly anything.
I’ve been wanting to update my website for quite a while. It got to the point that I wasn’t referring people to my old site because it had become such a poor representation of what Lincoln Loop has evolved into. I’ve also been bottling up a bunch of blogging I want to do about Django for the same reasons.
I set my sights on relaunching before this weekend and my first trip to SXSW. Since I’ll probably do more industry schmoozing there than I have in all the time I’ve been freelancing, I wanted to make sure I had a site I was proud to show off. While the site is still rough around the edges, it is done enough that I am comfortable putting it into production. Once I settle back in, I’m hoping to use this site as a platform to become ...
Posted
February 20, 2008.
Filed under
company news
I’ve been kicking around the idea of switching hosting providers for a while. I finally took the plunge and if you’re reading this, it is being served off the new platform. I’m going to be eating my own dog food for a few weeks along with a select few clients before officially deciding to move everything over.
If you notice any issues with my site or email, please let me know asap.
Posted
September 10, 2007.
Filed under
company news
I’m proud to announce that, as of today, Lincoln Loop, LLC has become a completely carbon neutral business.
Our footprint was pretty minimal to start. Our shared server, Olivia, only draws about 180 watts or 1 ton of CO2 a year by my best calculation. Since I don’t travel at all for business, the only other energy is the home office.
I was able to purchase wind energy directly from our local electric co-op, so the home office was easy. It will tack on about $20/month to my electric bill, but will cover most of the energy our household uses. For me, that is money well spent.
Getting the server carbon neutral was another story. Multiple conversations with the data center regarding purchasing renewable energy led nowhere. So, for now, I’ve decided to offset 2 tons of CO2 (should cover external cooling and some ...
A copy of this letter went out to the NDS Internet client list today.
I am pleased to announce that as of April 1, 2007, NDS Internet will become Lincoln Loop, LLC, Steamboat Springs’ only company dedicated exclusively to website design and hosting. I am taking over full ownership of the company and will no longer be affiliated with Northwest Data Services, LLC.
What Changes? Honestly, not much. I will still be the primary point of contact for all your website and email services. The service level you are accustomed to will not change (though I’m always striving to make improvements in that area). We will be maintaining the same billing system and servers. The biggest difference will be our contact and billing information, which is as follows:
Mailing Address: Lincoln Loop, LLC | PO Box 774441 | Steamboat Springs, CO 80477
First off, let me wish all our customers a happy new year. The new year brings some exciting news from NDSi: we’re popping the cork on our new online billing system!
We researched a number of systems and even started to build our own from scratch before stumbling upon FreshBooks. FreshBooks is a great invoicing solution for any small business and is going to streamline the billing process immensely for us. It provides us a secure site to generate and email or mail invoices as well as accept payments online.
Here is a rundown of the changes you will notice:
All invoices will be sent via email. We like this not only because it saves us money on stamps and time on stuffing envelopes, but by not using extra paper and the gas to deliver it, it is environmentally friendly to boot. The invoices can be printed if needed ...
We quietly rolled out a new design for our site last week. Ryan over at Whole Studios came through with a design and logo that fit us perfectly. Except for our Order and Support pages, the new site is 100% WordPress based. We created some custom plugins to make it all happen and we will be releasing them as open source in the near future.
In addition to the new design, we lowered our Postini pricing and increased our hosting package storage and monthly transfer allotments. These changes will be applied to all existing customers before the end of the year.
We’ve also moved network announcements to a new server in an offsite data center. This will allow us to keep you updated even in the unlikely event that services are unavailable here. It’s at status.lincolnloop.com, make sure to bookmark it. You’ll also find public ...
The move is just the beginning of some exciting stuff happening for us and our customers. Expect to see lots of improvements including, server upgrades and knowledgebase expansion and improvements. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve our service, please drop us a line at info@lincolnloop.com.
I’m proud to announce that, as of today, Lincoln Loop, 