Deep insights from our research and experience

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Optimize for Motivation

When your client is hundreds of miles away, but your bed only three feet, it helps to understand motivation. The first thing to understand about motivation is that it’s not something you do to someone. That’s called coercion. With enough …
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Backbone.js for Django Developers

Our new product Ginger relies heavily on Backbone.js for most of the client-side functionality (you can read about our full web-stack here). Our JavaScript guru Marco built the initial prototype and then was pulled away by client work. I reluctantly …
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At Lincoln Loop, Everyone Sets Their Own Salary

As mentioned in my previous post, everyone at Lincoln Loop sets their own salary. It’s another radical divergance from the business norm that we borrowed from the book of Ricardo Semler. Every six months, I meet with each of our …
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Four Libs Good, Two Libs Better

[with apologies to Mr. Orwell] I’ve noticed a subtle shift in how we approach building up new sites over the last couple of years. Our approach to site construction used to favor collecting open source apps and gluing them together …
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Open Book Finances

Maverick by Ricardo Semler was an eye-opening read for me a while back. It is a detailed account of his (highly profitable) company which is a radical departure from the traditional workplace. Rework (published over 20 years later) reads like …
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Why Regular Demos are Part of Our Development Process

Our team functions in different capacities for each business engagement, but we typically have a project or few where we’re exclusively building a large site for a client. In those scenarios we tend to use a loosely defined two-week development …
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On Fixtures and Factories

We’ve made it a general rule to move away from relying on fixtures in our projects. The main reasons are: Fixtures are fragile. They often break when the schema changes or even worse they appear to work but introduce subtle …
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Ginger Tech Stack

For our latest product, Ginger, we wanted to marry the real-time functionality we needed with the traditional Django stack we know and love. After some false starts and falling on our faces in the beginning, we ended with a stack …
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Quick Django Class Based View Decorator

The recommended way to add decorators such as login_required to class based views in Django is a bit verbose. Here’s a little metaclass-producing function you may find handy: def DecoratedDispatchMethod(actual_decorator): """ If you want to decorate the Class-based View with, …
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Down with 9 to 5

Development is a creative endeavor. Often developers are creating something where there was once nothing. For most us, the thought of being productive for 8 consecutive hours 5 days a week is laughable. 2-3 hours on a single problem is …