I want to share with you a great experience that I was a part of it on the last weekend. This post is a continues post to the one I published few weeks ago about the StartupWeekend Israel event.

We gathered up - a bunch of 56 amazing and talented people, each one with its own professional skills (technologic developers, BizDevs, project managers,  UI experts, graphic designers and more...) for 56 hours of hard work, philosophies, work plan, branding (marketing and advertising), programming developing and more. At the end of this weekend we succeeded to raise a prototype version of the project to the air.

First of all, I want to mention my friend Erez Eden that was the main engine behind the event, organized it in a perfect way - well done!

After voting for an idea from a pool of nice ideas that brought by some of the event members, the majority votes were given to a website that has called in the end of the event TribiU.com.

I won't give a spare words about the website - you can watch it in here. More details about the whole event, participants, work, idea and stuff you can check out in out community here.

So, some final words, I want to thank to all of the people that participated in this event, it was a pleasure, great time and fun; and I hope that we could do some more business together and don't forget the hard work has just began, we have to switch a gear and continue working as much as we can...

Me and Erez Tison	Dev Team
Architecture Team	UI Experts
Friends

Long time no written, I know.... I am quite busy these days at work and in my private time working on the web 2.0 startup with my colleagues.

I received an email from Kevin Gao, which is the leading developer of a nice source control software that called SourceAnywhere Hosted of Dynamsoft in order to check out their software tool. I decided to write about this tool, because this one is very suitable to me these days while working on my startup project. I actually needed a good source control in order to manage my code files properly.

So, some conclusions regarding this tool, after working with it close to a month. Let start from the important thing for small developers like me - this tool is FREE to use for up to 3 users, which can be suitable for small to medium projects with low number of developers.

The second thing that was fine by me is the interface of this software, which is very similar to the Microsoft source control (admit it or not - I am a fan of it... ;)), this gave me great a familiar navigation ability between the functionality possibilities and indeed there are some nice possibilities and abilities, like: users and groups roles management and managing your code files (the usual functionality such as rollback, commit, check in/out etc.)

The only disadvantage that I could think about here is a lack of files' state indicator. Dislike other source control tools that I worked with (like: Microsoft source safe control which indicates a file content changes or file state directly in the Visual Studio environment or the SubVersion control system, which indicates the file's state in in the actual file system folder), this tool doesn't indicates it and this is kind of annoying.

Generally I think this is a great tool to use it in order to manage your code version - again for small to  medium applications/projects.

You can read about it and download it free of charge (for up to 3 users of course) here. Have fun!

I introduces by Erez Eden (a friend and a colleague) to several tools that can track, watch and record your visitors behavior in order to give you some more details to improve your actions, publishing and more stuff in your website.

Although I am using the Google Analytics, which is great tool itself and supplies great statistics and analytics I decided to install one of them and to know my readers behavior and actions - maybe I could do something regarding it to improve the browsing experience in me weblog (sounds very sexy isn't it? ;)

RobotReplay
This one is very easy to install - all you need to do is to add simple script snippet into your master page header and let things go...
They are offering you:

• Improve your site's usability
• See where your readers get bored
• Convert more visitors to buyers (if you sell something e.n.)

Sounds interesting...
You can enjoy this service at: www.robotreplay.com

ClickTale
I quote: "Record visitors' every action as they browse your website. Watch movies to understand visitor behavior, gain valuable insights and improve your website's usability."

This tool created by couple Israeli people that I think they did here great job (I didn't investigate it deeply but it surely looks good). They offering free version of this one that limits the pages' reviews to 100 per week (is that enough for you?) and supply you also great information about your website surfers.

You can check it out yourselves here: www.clicktale.com

Enjoy...

Long time no post, I know... I have some stress at work these couple weeks, we need (I need*) to go on QA these days with the first step of the on working application (doing now some unit tests).

I ment going to Roy Osherove and Danko meeting regarding Agile and Scrum Planning but it didn't turn out, so I listened it through Roy's blog. I must say that I very enjoyed it and there were some things that actually match some of my cases regarding my working.

I Involved with some things that were said there but the most one is the distance issue. I am leading technologicly the web application that we are working on, and the rest of my team (2 software programmers and a project manager) are sitting in the US (Newark). Every evening (my evening - their morning) we are doing a conference meeting, sometimes on phone and sometimes on video and discussing the problems we bumped in, schedules, missions and some code reviews, this meeting is quite good and enable us to catch up on each other and to try manage the process of the working application.

BUT, this distance has a price! This price comes to fruition by time. Sometimes when I have some questions regarding the project spec, or just simple questions that I could get a quick answer from the project manager, I need to note'em and to send an detailed email regaring it.

Roy talked about it in his Scrum meeting introduction and said: "Keep team together, side by side, not even in seperate floors or rooms" and I think it's true, but like every project or something else in life anything has adventages and disadventages; This distance helped me to understand better the flow logic of the application, its functional specifications and more.

So, I'll try to bring in some more Scrum points into my team and project management...

I read a nice post at Web Worked Daily that holds the same title my post holds...

This post (click here to read it) talks about some very common mistakes that a web worker could do, I aggree that the post is focusing on freelancer web workers, but there are some very usefull topics that can contribute you something even if you are a salaried employee and you want to create yourself at the 'end of the day' a successful online career.

The post speaks also to team leaders that need to plan the project schedule, set missions to her team members (the actual developers), stick on deadlines and to deliver (at last) a fine working project to the development end point. In addition, this post also relates to project managers by that it shows some examples how to manage the specific project properly, how to devide missions in the right way and more...

AND, in the bottom line, it displays its 5 common mistakes...
Enjoy