PayrollHero lead engineer Suman Mukherjee presented the other day at a Ruby Meetup in Manila, Philippines. Suman put on a 20 minute clinic about some Ruby and JavaScript quirks for a room of about 50 engineers who are considering making the switch to Ruby. You can see his talk and slides below.
Suman Mukherjee
We operate in multiple locations, and have for quite some time now. We use technology to bridge the gap so that teams in all locations can feel like they are together. Google Hangouts and Facetime are the goto technology but we find using large TVs on either end make all the difference. The teams literally feel like they are standing in the room together. We do daily standups, one on one meetings and group calls standing in front of these TVs with team members all over the world. (we even set it up during our 4 month stint in San Francisco)
(above) The view through the “window” from Manila, Philippines into Whistler, Canada
(above) The view through the “window” from Whistler, Canada into Manila, Philippines
A couple guests dropped by the PayrollHero office today in Manila. Franco Eisma, who is our representative at AWS and is no stranger to the PayrollHero dojo dropped by with Richard Harshman, Head of ASEAN and India for Amazon Web Services.
Maybe next time we can get Richard boxing with our head trainer?
(L – R) Stephen Jagger, PayrollHero Co-Founder, Franco Eisma
and Richard Harshman, Amazon Web Services
PayrollHero is opening an engineering office in beautiful Whistler, BC.
PayrollHero was born out of our own need at OutsourcingThingsDone.com, where we tried to find a payroll, time and attendance solution for Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines, but nothing seemed to have the complete feature set that we were looking for. So, we decided to build our own, which is now, PayrollHero.
As part of our journey to grow PayrollHero and build out a team of passionate engineers we knew we had to be different if we wanted to attract top talent and compete for team members against Facebook, Salesforce and the like in the valley, as well as Hootsuite in Vancouver.
Our Manila office is fantastic, but we want to continue attracting top talent and knew we needed an engineering office in North America. So, we decided on Whistler, BC for its beauty, reasonable cost of living, excellent lifestyle and its proximity to Vancouver and Vancouver’s international airport.
We will be announcing more details on our “Adventure Engineering” job availabilities shortly… but consider this… if you want to work for a great startup, with a huge goal and work from Whistler and Manila, then PayrollHero could be for you. Drop us a line for more details.
(L – R) PayrollHero co-founders Michael Stephenson, Stephen Jagger and
PayrollHero Advisor Eric Reis at The Four Season’s Hotel in Whistler, BC (Feb. 2011)
PayrollHero was invited to pitch at the Startup Riot event in Seattle, WA last week. Along with 29 other startup PayrollHero co-founder Stephen Jagger had 3 minutes on stage, with maximum 4 slides to pitch the judges on the merits of PayrollHero.
After all 30 startups pitched, the judges met to decide on the “Judges Choice” for the top 5 startups. After a few minutes of deliberation, the judges announced that PayrollHero was their choice as one of the “Top 5” startups at Startup Riot 2012 Seattle.
If your interested in seeing the pitch, you can see the video below:
(You will notice I get a bit of a laugh at the start of the pitch. I was lucky to be 26th up to pitch, so had a benefit of watching others and seeing how the judges reacted. Most of the feedback was around the judges wanting to see more of the product. The problem is, none of us could change our slides as they were submitted a week earlier. So when I got on stage, I brought the PayrollHero TimeClock (iPad) with me and handed it to the judges. One of the judges jokingly commented that it was cheating, where I responded saying I thought it was smart)
The Top 5 Startups included:
– https://www.microryza.com – “Give Money To Research That You Care About”
– http://www.quoterobot.com – “Multi-Page Proposals In Moments”
– http://www.vendscreen.com – “Vending Machine Technology”
– http://www.trell.is – “On-Demand Android App Testing”
– http://www.payrollhero.com – “Optimizing Work Productivity With Happiness”
And 2 of them have Canadian roots!
Last May 31, 2012, newbies and seniors from renowned tech companies flocked to our PHRug Monthly Meetup hoping to deepen their knowledge regarding Backbone.
Guests from companies such as Friendster, AELogica, Clinic-IT, Devez, EngineYard and more, as well as a handful of freelancers were present for this much awaited meet-up.
Not surprisingly, a good number of representatives from the top Ruby dev shops in the Philippines were present as well.
The meetup was spearheaded by PayrollHero’s own senior developers Suman Mukherjee and Piotr Banasik, both core members of PayrollHero’s talented dev team.
The first half of the meetup was dedicated to learning more about “backbone”, as presented by Suman. He tackled subjects like the conditions in which backbone may be used to single page web apps and a few workaround in backbone. He also gave some good practices, tips and suggestions in the use of JavaScript and showed a practical example of how PayrollHero has used backbone for its features.
Our head developer, Piotr Banasik, capped off the meet-up with a discussion regarding Chef for automating server set-up and deployment.
The talk aimed to provide peer developers, especially our own PayrollHero developers, an overview of the usage of Backbone.
The agenda proved to be fruitful as members of the audience expressed their gratitude stating that it was a great help since they were not quite familiar with some workarounds, documentations, design patterns and good practices regarding backbone.
After the talk and a pizza dinner, the guests were given a tour around the office and some could not help but admit that they were quite impressed with PayrollHero’s Kanban boards, strategies and procedures. They marveled at the office set up and some were given a demonstration of some of PayrollHero’s functions.
Though they were not present for the meet-up, representatives from Amazon Web Services also dropped by to have a quick tour of our office.
The night ended well as developers and tech geeks alike mingled and engaged in various discussions regarding their current learnings and their insights.
(So cheers to another successful meet-up and we are looking forward to seeing more of you soon.)
The BCIC announced the other day that PayrollHero was one of the top 15 companies in the BCIC New Ventures Competition. There were over 100 companies in the competition and BCIC choose 15 as the top 15 companies and then had a mini pitch competition to add an additional 10 companies leaving only 25 companies left.
The final 10 companies moving on to Round 3 of the competition have been announced and they are (in alphabetical order):
These companies join the fifteen Round 3 companies previously selected and listed below alphabetically making a total of 25 companies in Round 3.
PayrollHero was chosen by Echelon at one of the “Top 10 Startups in Asia” and invited us to pitch with 9 other companies at their big tech conference in Singapore. We attended the conference had a booth in the demo pit and pitched PayrollHero on stage in front of a full house.
We revised our pitch a bit from the Jakarta event the week before. Check it out below, let us know what you think:
PayrollHero was chosen by TechInAsia.com as one of Asia’s top 16 startups and invited to pitch at their technology conference “Startup Asia” in Jakarta.
We attended the conference and pitched PayrollHero on stage in front of over 600 attendees. The conference was awesome and PayrollHero ended up coming 2nd place.