Scott, our reigning heavyweight in research and development, had been telling us since 2008 about a legendary developer that he once knew – a man who was tall as a redwood, sharp as a tack, a dev who covered the full stack, who could Project Manage, and who just ‘got shit done’. We asked ourselves who was this unicorn, and where could we find such a beast? Little did we know that a couple years later, we’d get the heads up that Derek was looking for a good team to join.

Derek took a well worn trajectory as a developer, starting with a small company, joining a startup, moving up the ladder to the corporate canyons of media and broadcast, only to finally realize that he wanted to find a team who felt the same way as he did.

So we started a conversation over beers with Derek, and immediately discovered that there was perfect alignment in what we were all looking for. Derek wanted to truly build a career, learning from the best, teaching others what he knew, and working in an environment where people cared about what they did.

Derek walked in the TWG office and we all had a double take. Here was a 6 foot 9, smiling giant, with a laptop that looked like a toy in his hand. Chris and Andres nudged each other knowingly.. because this was going to take our AgencyBall team to the all-world finals.

But Derek’s a bit of a study in contrasts. He’s not a basketball player, and apart from his stature, he’s not imposing or imperial. He’s quickly found his spot among the new TWG’ers as a senior and very versatile developer. As he gets his feet wet here, each week we’re happily surprised when he steps up and takes on a new role within a new project.  It’s been a big year for Derek and his soon to be growing family.. He’s got a little one on the way, a new house, and now a new position as a senior dev at TWG. We’d like to welcome Derek Watson to the TWG family. It’s going to be great, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have him.

TWG is a web development shop for designers, coders, thinkers and friends. Each day we pour all of our creative energy into what we love, and that makes getting out of bed in the morning the easiest decision we make all day.

For some, working at TWG will be a career, for others, it will be a stepping stone on the way to other even greater things. And we’re fine with that, because we know that everyone’s path is a little bit different. In fact TWG’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to be the best software company in the world to learn, work and grow at. We love our work, and that makes it fun to create incredible web and mobile experiences for our clients, partners and community.

If you’re still intrigued, please read on..

In the winter, we often take a week off and head somewhere sunny to regroup, re-energize and dream up the next big idea we want to tackle.

In the summer, we like to take a week to head somewhere north with a nice lake, to sit around campfires, play music, and assess our progress and plan for the months ahead.

And in between, we do all sorts of good stuff in our studio, building web and mobile applications for our clients, as well as designing and developing our own web and mobile products to bring online. If you’re a talented web developer, and think you have plenty to learn and plenty to share, please read on..

So where are you at?

There are some things you should know something about. For each line that you satisfy, count 2 points:

You have excellent HTML and css skills, bonus point if you can point to something that you coded in HTML5.

You have a solid grasp of javascript, jQuery, ajax, json

You have experience coding in Ruby on Rails,

You have experience programming iOS, Android, or Blackberry (gasp) applications

You know what OOP is

You write tests (UnitTest, RSpec, or some other test driven framework)

You have used mySQL or PostgreSQL

You use code versioning systems

You have worked in PHP, or .NET,

Context points. For each line that you satisfy, count 1 point:

You speak another language well, or have a *fünny* last name,

You can play a musical instrument,

You play a team sport regularly or you ride a bike,

You like to paint, draw, sculpt, and build things

You keep a blog,

You use twitter regularly.

You enjoy teaching

So what do you score?
If you score OVER 17, then send us your score breakdown and get in touch today! If you score over 23, we’ll buy you a two martini lunch.

How To Get In Touch:
To avoid people who don’t like to read or have fun, and evil robots that like to spam the world, we want you to email us at info@twg.ca and we want you to place the the immortal words of Lionel Ritchie in the subject line: Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

Following our Earth-shaking (Toronto) tech scene announcement on Tuesday, we’re glad to announce that two more code-slingers have joined the infamous TWG posse.

(^bad-asses)

Stephan (Frenchie) Leroux brings a deadly array of iOS, Android and Blackberry skills. By day he shoots with deadly speed and accuracy in any mobile environment, and by night he picks up his guitar to strum by the campfire, keeping the team calm, cool and collected.

Kenneth (Kenny) Lee uses the power of his mind to incapacitate his foes (browser inconsistencies, non-trivial application workflows). Kenneth joins TWG from the weird and wonderful world of Startups, where he wrestled (bare chested) SVG, javascript and css monsters.

Together, these two fine code-slingers add some more muscle to our team, and ensure that we can tackle any challenge that gets in our way. Take your hats off, or give a curtsey to the two new bad-boys in town – Steph and Kenneth.

TWG is sounding the trumpets again.

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Tom Walsham has joined the TWG team. Tom brings an impressive array of product management and analytics experience to our team, and we couldn’t be happier at finding such a great guy to join us in our Mission to make TWG the best dev shop in the world for learning, working, creating and growing.

I met Tom over a year ago at the LeanCoffee meetups. Whenever he spoke I found myself nodding at his thoughtful contrarian views, finely structured arguments, and dashing flights into the esoteric. We arranged to have a pint together at the Foggy Dew to talk about English premiership football, the web, mobile, product development, and how we all strive to find that balance between a rewarding career, and a healthy family and social life. A couple of pints of beer in, he and I nodded sagely when we agreed that ultimately it’s the journey that’s the reward, and not the destination. And so, upon this foundation of profound Hallmark™ confucian truth, we decided to collaborate on a project to test our compatibility further. As luck would have it, things worked out exceedingly well, and so today we’re making it official that Tom is joining forces with TWG in our pursuit of product development virtue.

Tom’s an experienced product manager, marketing engineer, and analytics grand-master, all rolled into one handsome chap. The cherry on top is that he’s a great communicator and teacher. He comes from England to Toronto via Guatemala, joined by a wonderful partner, a beautiful daughter, and a fine dog. From an early start in coding BASIC on the BBC Micro at age 5 [10 PRINT "Matthew smells"\n20 GOTO 10] and writing games on the venerable Commodore Amiga he took that fateful detour through a Philosophy degree before getting back onto the technology train, working at Cambridge University. Among the many accolades that have been showered upon Tom (far too many to list here) I’d like to highlight a few of the non-technical ones:

1. Tom got Archbishop Desmond Tutu drunk at the University of Cambridge in 1999. Technically it was the wine that got Tutu drunk, but Tom was facilitating the evening.
2. Tom was repeatedly told to ‘get out of the way’ by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge in 2000.
3. Tom bootstrapped the Toronto Zombiewalk from 2004-2008
4. Tom is far away the most entertaining Karaoke singer in the Toronto tech scene.

But humour aside, we’re delighted to have Tom join us because he adds a great depth of experience in Product Management, specifically in driving product development decisions through the lens of user analytics. This will help our team continue to improve our own products like PostageApp, as well as the products that our clients ask us to design and build. Tom likes to say that the best data your app can tell you is what your users aren’t doing, and we think that this common blind spot  will now shrink and become a competitive advantage for us, because we now have his experience and the right tools to measure and act on it.

The good news at TWG doesn’t stop here! We also have two new amazing developers that we’ll be introducing to the Toronto scene later this week. Plans are in the works to host a Band and Karoke night, where friends and colleagues can come by to meet the new faces.

So stay tuned.. but in the meantime, please raise a glass to toast a great match – Tom Walsham with TWG.

Here at TWG, we’re always inspired by the Toronto dev community, so we’re extremely excited to kick-off our first #nerdlearn panel of the year. On February 2nd (Groundhog Day!) at 6pm, we’ll be chatting about The Future of JavaScript at the TWG studio, unit 501. Grab a ticket here, and follow updates on Twitter at #nerdlearn.

This round, we’ll be talking JavaScript with three developers from the Toronto community, who are all passionate about not only this topic, but about web and mobile development in general. We can’t wait to hear their perspective on what the future will bring, and how JavaScript will fit into that future.

Meet our first panelist, Cameron Westland of Big Bang Technology Inc.

1. Cameron Westland – @camwest

Cam is the co-founder of Big Bang Technology Inc., as well as an experienced web developer. He’s a strong believer in the power of web technology to give people new perspectives, educate, and empower them. He does both front-end and back-end development, so you better believe he’s had ample JavaScript experience. Cam is very active in the Toronto dev community, and organizes JavaScript Hack Nights hosted by Big Bang. Cam’s curiosity often gets the better of him, and he’s always exploring many subject areas outside of technology.

Our second panelist, Jack Neto, is part of The Working Group family.

2. Jack Neto – @jack_neto

Jack was employee #1 at TWG back in 2005, and is now a Partner and Tech Lead of a 10 person dev team. Jack’s a quick study, a perfectionist, and an old hand at information handling and graphic interfaces. He’s been a developer for longer than he can remember, built more web apps than he can count, and used JavaScript for almost every one of those. Jack’s been talking our ears off about this topic ever since he attended The Keeping it Realtime Conference in Portland earlier this year. Most recently, he’s been obsessed with finding ways to use all the great new JavaScript technology in his Rails apps.

Dan Williams, our third panelist, lives in node.js land at Igniter.

3. Dan Williams – @deedubs

Dan is the lead developer at Igniter. Having learned at young age that drawing and painting weren’t in his genes, he turned to code as his creative outlet. After years of experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails, he’s found his home in node.js. For Dan, node is like a mind-meld with code. Living in an event-driven world, node maps naturally to the way the world works, making it easier than ever to create the world that comes next. Known as deedubs in the ether, he can often be found contributing to code communities though github and IRC where he is immersed in building better infrastructure for building better apps.

Our surprise fourth panelist, Stephen Hamer, has done things in the browser that you’ve never even heard of.

4. Stephen Hamer – @StephenHamer

Stephen is a co-founder at Upverter Inc. here in Toronto. He spends his time at Upverter trying to make electronics design easier, bringing some of the things he can’t live without in software development, like version control, to hardware development. His recent forays into JavaScript have been using the Google Closure library and tools to build a browser based CAD tool. Stephen also spends a good deal of time doing server side development in Python. Recently he’s fallen in love with gevent and is trying to find ways to use it in each of his new projects.

A little bit of background …

Last summer, we decided to start hosting #nerdlearn panels to bring together developers from the community, and give them the chance to learn from our panelists, who are always experts on the topic of the evening. The events are always very casual. We start the night off with pizza, beer, and mingling, followed by the actual panel for about an hour. Although we do have a general plan for the discussion, we encourage the audience to get involved throughout the hour, ask our panelists tough questions, and shout out their opinions.

If you’re a developer in Toronto, and you’re more than ready to #nerdlearn and meet other great local developers, come out and join us on February 2nd at 6pm!

When you love what you do, and who you are with, excellence will follow.

The #1 reason I adore coming to work every day is for the opportunity to work with an awesome team filled with smart, ambitious people who love what they do.

It’s a privilege I’ve been appreciative of every single day, week, month and year that I’ve been a partner at TWG, and today we’re celebrating a new team milestone: our first TWG’er, Dessy, is interviewing at Y-Combinator.

I know what you’re thinking, why would we be celebrating the fact that one of our developers might not be coming back from California?

But before I answer, let me muse on what makes a great developer.

In baseball, a five-tool player is someone who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, baserunning skills & speed, throwing ability, and fielding ability.

Players considered in this elite group have included Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Andre Dawson, and Duke Snider, as well as Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodrigues (in their primes).

At TWG, a five-tool developer might look like someone who excels at:

1. Architecture & Planning;
2. Back-end coding;
3. Front-end coding;
4. Mobile development;
5. Communication – with stakeholders (someone who speaks geek & client); and

But wait.. There’s more.

There’s a bonus sixth tool.

6. Closing. I repeat… closing. Finishing. Completing. Shipping. Done for real.

When you run a company that builds Internet based software, you dream of having a five-tool dev. Frankly, if you have developers who excel in 3 of these categories, you’re doing great, and you can build a very successful team. If you have developers who excel in 4 or 5 of these categories, you hope to work with them forever – trust me. But a legendary six-tool developer, now your in “pinch-me” territory.

Back to the celebration.

One of our rising stars, Dessy Daskalov is well on her way to becoming a six-tool developer. She tech leads her own projects; builds back-ends and front-ends; develops in Rails and iOS; takes the project management burden off Dom, Chris, Jeremy and me because she’s so good with our clients; and she gets shit done!

Dessy also finds time on evenings and weekends to build side project she’s passionate about. These talents and efforts helped her get in front of Paul Graham at YC, and we’re very proud of her.

A year ago, Dom and I realized that personal and professional growth can’t be treated like a zero sum game. The goal is always for both sides to benefit and succeed, even if that means someone has to move on (one day).

We don’t know whether Paul Graham will be accepting Dessy and her team to YC, but we do know that opportunities like that don’t come around for everyone, and we’re extremely proud of her, and supportive of her efforts.

Go Go Dessislava!

After 9 years of building great web applications, web sites, and system integrations for clients of every stripe, The Working Group (TWG) is expanding our service offering to include mobile application development.

Why are we getting into mobile?

Well, the truth is we’ve been doing it for a while. We launched our first mobile app about two years ago and have been developing them for select clients ever since. And for us, formalizing this into a full service offering just seemed like a logical progression given what we do: help organizations build and grow their business online.

Because right now it isn’t about web vs. mobile, it’s about combining the strengths of web and mobile together to help our clients get to where they want to be.  So we’ve decided to make it official and really put our backs into mobile application development.

Some New Faces at TWG:

We’ve brought on some great people to make sure our mobile application development is as strong as the web side of our shop. Chris Eben joined us in September as a managing partner and will be leading the business side of our mobile division.  We’re also privileged to have Jeremy Bower, formerly of Viigo and Polar Mobile, as our director of mobile development. Jeremy brings a wealth of dev chops to TWG, and will be tasked with building a world class team covering the major platforms, including iOS, Android, Blackberry and mobile web. Look for more information on Chris and Jeremy on this blog in the coming weeks.

Let’s Talk Mobile:

If you are thinking about developing a mobile app for your business, or if you just want to know more about our offering, please contact us at: 416.850.2500 /  info@twg.ca or checkout our mobile portfolio.

There’s a big reason TWG has been attending LeanCoffeeTO for 1 year…

It’s not only for the Lean…
It’s certainly not for the Coffee…

It’s all about the TO!

photo credit: Chris Mudiappahpillai

For TWG, LeanCoffee has been about the trusted relationships we’ve uncovered.
I’m talking about the intelligent, driven, passionate, GOOD PEOPLE we get to debate business issues with each week, and learn from all year.

Today was a great reminder of how much we’ve gained in the past 12 months, as we all reminisced about the past year of lean, and deliberated our hopes for the year to come. It wasn’t too heavy, just a bunch of leanists drinking mimosas on a rooftop, celebrating the past and getting eager for what’s to come.

photo credit: Chris Mudiappahpillai

We look forward to another 52 weeks of 8am congregations. We look forward to making friends with more of Toronto’s brightest entrepreneurs. And of course, we look forward to being challenged and inspired by this vibrant community of thinkers and doers.

Thank you #LeanCoffeeTO.

PS – In case you missed Day 1 of Lean Week, checkout the recap from MyCityLives. And please join us for more Lean Week tomorrow at BigBangTechnology, Thursday at Jet Cooper, and Friday at BNOTIONS.

TWG is a digital agency of thinkers, designers, coders, and friends – lovingly crafting the internet since 2002.

We’ve partnered with TEDxToronto since year one because it personally reminds and inspires us to keep looking forward, and to keep getting better. Like TEDxTO, TWG works with people that want to bring great ideas into existence – that’s what excites us the most.

This year’s TEDxTO theme ‘redefinition’ resonates particularly well because we sense a paradigm shift happening within internet technology. We see the ‘internet’ continuing to be the primary information ‘network’, however we also expect the channels through which it is exposed and accessed to change radically in the next five years. PC-based ‘Web’ will be supplanted by mobile, tablet, console, and transmedia experience. If redefinition means changing our understanding and thus relationships to existing things, then we’re about to see that happen with the internet.

Redefinition is a challenge that every creative individual faces in their life; and in their career. So thank you TEDxToronto for inspiring and helping redefine TWG’s creativity.

Today’s Live Stream: http://live.tedxtoronto.com

Dom & Andrés talk TEDxTO in last year’s sponsor video:

Produced by: TheBizMedia.com

We <3 nerds, and we <3 the Toronto dev community, so on August 25th we hosted our second #nerdlearn panel. Since mobile is the future, we wanted to discuss what the future of mobile dev is with some respected members of the Toronto mobile dev community.

Jeremy Bower, Pearl Chen, and Jeff Zakrzewski did an amazing job describing mobile development today, and speculating on what the future will bring. They also tackled some tough questions thrown out by our amazing audience.

Jon Lim put his videography skills to good use the night of #nerdlearn:

We had some great conversation,

lots of audience participation,

and the necessities of all good dev events: mingling, beer, and pizza.

A huge thank you to our panelists and audience members, we can’t wait to have you back for the next one!