How to Hire a Mobile Software Developer
If you’re ever tried to outsource a software project, you know that it can be quite difficult to find a team that will deliver the software on-spec, on-budget, & on-time. Getting these three things right is at the crux of getting the functionaltity that you need to continue growing your business and keeping your sanity.
At Snapp, we know all about the challenges that companies have in this process (we hear from our clients about how many times they’ve been burned in the past by software engineers).
Here are a few things that you should do every time you bring a new developer on board.
- Have them write code during your initial interview. This is something that I learned from Josh Coates, founder of Mozy. He did this with every tech-related new hire he brought on, & it allowed him to immediately know if somebody was qualified to work there. Obviously, in order to perform this step effectively, you need to have an in-house guy who is intelligent enough & experienced enough with technology that he’ll be able to spot bad code. Have your potential consultant spend 30 minutes writing up some code on something that should be relatively trivial considering what they’ll be doing for you. For example, if you are going to hire an iPhone develoepr, have him code “Hello World” for you. If he can’t do this fairly quickly, you might want to keep looking.
- Check references. This is such an easy step — too often it gets overlooked. All you need to do is say, “Can we have the name and number of 3 past clients?” Then spend 30 minutes calling these people and asking them questions like:
- Was the original cost estimate correct? If not, how much over/under?
- Was the orginal timeline given correct? If not, how late was the project?
- Was the software written to spec?
- Was the developer easy to work with?
All in, this “background check” will take you 30 minutes to an hour, but will potentially save you thousands of dollars, prevent headaches, & give you the best chance of finding the best developer. - Ask to see previous work. This is another simple request that can save you lots of headache. Seeing work that the person has done before can help you to see their style of code, or if you don’t know code and have nobody in the company that does, can help you to see whether they have a good grasp on the other important parts of software design: user interface, speed of code, etc.
- Don’t give a blank check. Unless you’re dealing with a company that has a very established reputation, you have the leverage to pay per-project, not per-hour. Take advantage of this, & you will decrease your potential liability.
Outsourcing a software development project can be a big stress-relief and can also potentially save you money and time. Pick the right team, & you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them. Pick wrong, & you’ll be wishing you hadn’t signed that contract!
Fun Things to do this Weekend with your iPhone
With the weekend coming up, I thought it would be cool to highlight a few of the fun things that an iPhone can do when you’re not at work… or I guess when you’re at work, but not really working.
Anyway, here’s the list. Feel free to sound off on the comments if they’ve missed something.
Have a great weekend!
Spotlighting business that incorporate mobile devices – DW Morgan
I found the info below on Apple’s website. Obvoiusly, it’s a bit self-serving of them & they have a strong bias towards promoting the information; even so it is relevant. And they highlight a growing trend of companies taking advantage of smartphones — essentially mini-computers.
The highlights:
DW Morgan saved $100,000 when they adoped iPhones for all of their delivery drivers — now they are able to keep track of where inventory is, what packages have been signed on, which deliveries have been made, and where drivers are at any given time.
“We always gave customers the information,” says President Grant Opperman. “But it took a lot of phone calls and a lot of individual effort. And between the time the driver took the signature and the time it was uploaded, there could be a 24-hour delay.”
A 24-hour delay is an eternity in today’s business environment. Getting information to be universally available to the right people as quickly as possible can be either a huge compettive advantage, or a crippling flaw in a company’s operations.
“For years, we’d been looking for a mobile device that would allow us to update shipment information, collect signatures, and get GPS tracking on every individual box we deliver,” he says. “Ten years ago, it was available, but it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“For $199, we can get an iPhone and make it work exactly how we want,” Morgan says. “I can go to almost any country, give my driver an iPhone, and he’s up and running.”
To read the original article & watch a video, go to http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/profiles/dw-morgan/
Another interesting quote from Apple’s website:
One unanticipated benefit of iPhone: introducing technology to workers who used to resist it. “I can give an iPhone to someone who’s working on the dock or to a truck driver,” Opperman says. “And that guy doesn’t necessarily think of it as a computer that’s intimidating. He thinks of it as, ‘Oh, it’s a phone, and it’s really cool because I can put my music on it and pictures of my family, and I can send emails and text messages. And while he’s thinking about all of the neat things he can do, he’s also learning a piece of equipment that helps me run my business. And now I’ve got that person embracing technology and helping me figure out how we can use it better for our customers.”
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5 iPhone apps that will make you more productive
- Toodledo
- Habit Factor
- SugarSync
- Evernote
- Maps
This is by far my favorite app for implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. I don’t use his system to the letter, as contexts are sort of meaningless for me (I’m always near a phone, a computer, and an internet connection; and this is where 90% of my work happens). I do, however, love the principles he teaches, such as to have a weekly planning session, to have a list of projects, a list of actions, & a list of short-term & long-term goals, as well as a list of the different areas of stewardship in my life.
This is a cool little app that I started using about a week ago. It replaced “Streaks” for me on accident. It went like this. I had to go into Apple to get my 3rd iPhone, & wasn’t able to restore my apps because Apple told me they had to rule out the “tethering hack” as a cause of my problems, meaning I needed to wipe my iPhone clean and go back to factory settings. Anyway….
back to Habit Factor. It allows you to set a goal & then set habits to go along with it. For example, you might set a goal to have 100 blog posts by three months from now. After you’ve setup your goal, you setup habits, small steps that much be accomplished on a regular basis in order for you to reach your goal.
All of that is cool, but where the app is different from Streaks is this: as you proceed along the path to your goal, you can check your progress, either as a % of your total goal, or as a fraction. So if you want to write those 100 blog posts, & you’ve written 33, you’d see “33% complete” when you checked the app.
That little “progress meter” helps keep me motivated.
This is actually a web service which has introduced an iPhone app. The web service is really similar to DropBox, allowing you to sync files across multiple computers.
The app has saved me a bunch of times. For example, my company was working on an important project that was due the next day. I had gone home already because family was in town. We went out to the movies to see Star Trek (which was awesome), and I got an email, “Dude, the files are corrupted on the Shared drive. Do you happen to have an extra copy of everything?” This was a 67 page doc, with about 17 exhibits — losing it would have been a nightmare.
I wasn’t worried about losing it because I not only had it backed up online through SugarSync, but also had it backed up on 3 different hard drives (all of which are hooked up through SugarSync), and backed up on an external hard drive.
As cool as that was, it got better.
I was just sitting down to enjoy Star Trek, & Captain Kirk’s dad was getting ready to sacrifice his life for his family — what a stud — so I didn’t want to go home to grab my laptop. No worries, I shot back an email, “I’m going to share a SugarSync link with you, you’ll need to setup a quick account but is should be painless.”
I then logged into my SugarSync iPhone app (SugarSync organizes your files just like on your computer). I searched for the folder where all the files were, clicked “Share,” typed in my co-worker’s email address, & hit send. Bam! Files shared.
Saved me some serious time & stress, and I got back to my movie.
SugarSync has a free version, where you get up to 2GB free — they also have a paid version, which starts at like $5 a month.
The reason I have this app is actually similar to the reason I have SugarSync, except that with Evernote I can go deeper and actually search through all my documents’ text, & access it from the phone. If you have OneNote, & use it for taking notes, you can easily import all your OneNote doc’s from within the Evernote’s Desktop version. You can also import most of your other text files, and then have all of this searchable from your iPhone.
The other things that Evernote allows you to do is take text notes, voice notes, picture notes from the iPhone.
The unique thing about Evernote (as there are many note-taking apps available on the iPhone), is that you can access your files from the iPhone, the desktop, or online.
Universal access to your most important notes.
So this one’s not exactly a productivity app per-se, and it comes with the iPhone so you have it no matter what, but I love it. If I was a bigger spender, I’d upgrade and down one of the new turn-by-turn apps, but for now Maps is good enough for me & saves me time driving around wondering where in the world I am.
Those are my favorites, but if you have any of your own that I missed let me know in the comments.
Thanks!
A Quick Step-by-Step Guide on Becoming an iPhone Developer
- Buy a Mac, and one of the newer ones with an Intel-based processor, running the Leopard version of OS X. To cut down on cost, you can buy a Mac-Mini, and plug it into your existing keyboard & monitor. To further reduce costs, only buy one — and setup remote login so the rest of the team can contribute code when they need to.
- Download the SDK & bang out a Hello World app to start getting the feel for iPhone/iPod Touch development.
- Get “Programming in Objective C.” The cheapest place I could find is actually Chegg (so you’d be renting the book for 4 months). If you’d rather buy it you can grab it here for about $24. For a free version of a different Objective C book that you can read online, check out this.
- Build something simple. Don’t focus on building a hit, just try to solve a simple problem that you have, or a frustration you have, or the response to one of those times you said, “Man, it would be cool if I could do x on my iPhone.”
- Become an official iPhone developer. This costs $99 and a few minutes maneuvering through Apple’s site.
- Buy an iPhone or iPod Touch. If you’re concerned about cash, I’d go with a Touch. If you’re concerned about money and have some generous friends, you might borrow an iPhone for testing, or just all of your friends come over so you can upload the app on their device and let them try it.
- Code up and release your first app, no matter how small. Momentum is so key at this stage — releasing an app will give you a psychological win, and help you to stay motivated. There’s nothing worse than perfecting an app to the point of exhaustion, and then releasing it only to find out that nobody wants it.
- Contact other developers who are building apps that are in other categories, and talk about trading impressions or cross-promoting each other’s apps in other ways.
If your app becomes a big hit, then you might be tempted to end your iPhone development career for now. If it’s not a hit or it isn’t paying the bills now, use the credibility that you have gained by launching an app to sell your coding skills to somebody else with a big idea.
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