Once in a Lifetime
As a young man, I was fond of listening to a lot to Talking Heads, so although the song describes a character dealing with their mid-life crisis (of which I believe mine are (mostly) over), I felt no other title to this introductory post would best describe my feelings: I am overwhelmed by joining Peldi and the gang at Balsamiq to do what I believe will be some of the most fulfilling work to come in some twenty years in challenging startup environments. The reason is that if Balsamiq with its good humour prides itself on "adding flavor", the pun is not innocent in the sense that it takes the right combination of ingredients, process and intention (or vision) to bring a product like Balsamiq Mockups to the desktops and wikis of so many satisfied customers.
Entrepreneurship being above all a human endeavor, clearly the ingredients are there ! Not only is our small distributed team a joy to work with, but our partners and customers provide a rich foundation for improvement and building the future through conversations taking place all around the clock whether they concern our products or are simply encouragements do do even better. Our processes are agile and ruthlessly focused on bringing value to our customers through new features, enhancements, bug fixes, and usability improvements. Release cycles are short and feedback is only a tweet or a post on our community site at GetSatisfaction away. Finally, it only takes briefly studying Balsamiq's track record to understand that on top of all of this rich substrate of ingredients on which to build a successful business, we have in our founder Peldi, the rare quality of non compromising leadership based on values.
Now I know all of this through experience because among other business activities, I have been working with Peldi and Marco in stealth mode all of this past year on our our webapp project MyBalsamiq. So I am thrilled to be able from now on to focus all of my time on MyBalsamiq and bring the product out the door so that our customers old and new will be in the position use Mockups online with their customers and co-workers. Thank you Peldi for making this possible !
Finally, please note that this is a brand new blog at Balsamiq! The Balsamiq Tech Blog will be a place for us to engage technical discussions focused on the tools, technology and processes that we use to build our products such as Flex, Grails or agile software development. This will also be the place for us to talk about the modules we release as open source. Hopefully all of this will be helpful to our customers and beyond, and the benefits of learning and improving software development skills with our readers will be mutual.
