Trevi is not only a fountain in Italy, it’s our new application framework as well. We migrated our first pages to this new platform and brought them online three weeks ago. But let me explain the story of Trevi.

Another Framework?

There’re already thousands of web frameworks out there so I would sink into the ground if we really wrote another one. But serving pages for 2 million unique clients, it would also not have been a solution to just go to a shop and take the beautiful looking, nice boxed xyz framework from a big company. So my co-worker (and Trevi project lead) Maarten started a year ago to evaluate a framework that fits our needs best.
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For me, the time around Christmas and New Year is the best time of the year. Of course, there’s the peaceful family reunions around the christmas tree. The cozy evenings at home on the couch. Or days where you can shamelessly sleep in. In my case I am expecting my son Orell who should be born anytime.

But stop: This is a business related blog. And so I am not talking about my private life. When I say “the best time of the year” I am thinking about work. There’s no better time of year for not taking vacations. Here’s why:
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We’d like to deliver great products on tilllate.com. For great products you need motivated developers. So recently, Leo, Stefan, Maarten, Mario and me did a brainstorming about “what motivates programmers”. Here are the results:

1. Offer him the best type of work

Avoid giving finished specs to your developer. Let him do the specifications himself. Let him do the technology selection. Let him define the architecture. Give him challenging tasks to do on technologies he has never used before. Keep routine and maintenance work from him (nevertheless, someone has to do those tasks).

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As CTO I often have to do job interviews. Recently, I spent two days interviewing candidates for our tilllate development center Belgrade (Yes, I am one of these brave CTOs having a distributed team :-)). So here’s five tips to impress your employer of your dreams:

Keep a low profile!

Andy writes in his CV that he’s "extemely experienced in OOP". And when I ask him why he thinks he’s so experienced OOP he tells me: "My biggest class has 25′000 lines.". Ooops. God class. Classical Antipattern. Not only he showed that he has no idea of good OOP coding style. But also he cannot judge his own skills. Once at your company he’ll be the guy grabbing every cool project but then not finishining due to missing skills. Zap. Disqualified.

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There are two ways convince a company to switch to a new programming language. The old fashioned way is to send out salesperson. They get in touch with the CEO show them a few Power-Point slides, throw some buzzwords at them and voilà, Mr. Manager will introduce that new technology.

Well, he will try to introduce that new technology. In most of the cases it won’t work. Because usually the CEO looks at other things when deciding for a programming language than the development team. The dev-team won’t accept the new technology. This will slow down development and thus reduce productivity.

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Bei tilllate ist momentan eine Diskussion zum Thema “Integration von externen Applikationen auf www.tilllate.com” im Gange. Dieser Artikel beleuchtet Kosten und Risiken einer solchen Integration.

Beispiel: Anstatt ein Forum selbst zu entwickeln, soll FUDForum oder phpBB genommen werden und auf tilllate.com integriert werden. Damit sollen Entwicklungskosten und -zeit gespart werden. Warum etwas, was es auf dem Markt schon gibt, selbst entwickeln?
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