I had the opportunity to attend RubyConf a few weeks back and I ended up having a number of conversations around the tools we use at DevMynd. So, I thought I’d share a little about how the sausage is made 😉 This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means but here we go:
Team Tools
Github
This one is obvious. We love Github and use it not only for source code control but for code reviews and development workflow.
Flowdock
Flowdock is awesome, think of it as a team IM + information radiator. We have one common chat room for everyone in the company and then each development project has it’s own room for more focused conversations.
We automate a lot of things from Flowdock as well, including our “On Air” light for the status boards which indicate that we have clients in the office. Flowdock is also hooked into Github and Codeship so we can see build and branch status.
Trello
We’re an agile shop through and through. One of the tools that supports this way of working is Trello, which is an agile “card wall” style tool. Trello allows us to customize the workflow differently for each project’s specific nuances. We always encourage clients to use Trello as well to increase visibility and help us shape the direction of a project. Trello also gives the entire team a common place to store questions, answers, status, etc.
Development & Design Tools
Codeship
Our continuous integration system of choice, Codeship, makes testing and deploying very simple as it integrates directly with Github. We also use the Codeship API to power our status boards in the office so everyone knows a project’s build status.
TestFlight
Web projects are easy to demo but for native mobile apps it’s important to have a mechanism to distribute builds to team members and client stakeholders. That’s where TestFlight comes in. We use this for our iOS and PhoneGap projects.
Honeybadger
For error reporting and uptime monitoring we use Honeybadger. We previously used Airbrake (which is still a good system) but find the Honeybadger interface a little more friendly. Tools like Honeybadger allow us to proactively fix issues for customers before they even know…which makes us look like heroes 😉
New Relic
Regardless of where we deploy web projects we hook up NewRelic for performance monitoring. Since we often use Heroku as a hosting platform, NewRelic is trivial to set up.
CodeClimate
We’re big on code quality at DevMynd, we spend a lot of time doing code reviews and pair programming to keep our code clean and well tested. One of the newer tools out there to help with this is CodeClimate. While no tooling can take the place of human eyeballs in terms of code review, CodeClimate does a good job of highlighting hotspots.
Wireframing
There are tons of wireframing tools out there and none of them really beat paper and pencil. We usually start just at a whiteboard or, my personal favorite, graph paper! I like this 11×17″ pad from Staples.
When we do move to doing digital wireframes there are two tools we like. First is Balsamiq. It’s an easy to use tool that isn’t fussy about design so you can focus on just getting the layout and UX pieces right. If we need to do something more interactive, we’ll pull in Axure.
Business/Operations Tools
Time Tracking & Invoicing
As a services business we need to keep track of billable hours for our projects. We’ve tried a number of tools for this but none have beaten Harvest. We actually use it for more than just time tracking and also handle employee expenses and PTO here. As a bonus, the Harvest API is fantastic and we pull data from it to build a number of operational reports.
Sales & CRM
We’ve tried many CRM tools, sooo many CRMs. All of them are problematic in some way and need customization to fit our sales process. But, the one that’s worked out the best so far is Pipedrive. It’s a lot like Trello in that it allows us to build different pipelines for different purposes as well as gives us a common place for contact information and notes about customers and sales pursuits.
Email, Calendar, Docs
Google Apps for Business…stop installing Microsoft Office…it’s almost 2014.
Advertising & Marketing
This one is still evolving for us, but we do a lot of stuff with Twitter right now and Buffer is a great tool for scheduling messaging through social media. We use Meetup to host registration for our various events. We use Google Analytics and Gaug.es for monitoring our website traffic. Lastly, we send an occasional email newsletter using MailChimp.
So that’s it, without these tools we’d be building a lot of internal stuff that would take away from our availability to build awesome stuff for our customers. Personally, I wish I could thank each of these companies individually for making DevMynd possible in some small way!
