Crocodile in the Yangtze: Asia Premier Screening (& Contest)

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Exciting news! PayrollHero has arranged for the Asia Premier of the film “Crocodile in the Yangtze” to be showcased in the Philippines. We have put together an exclusive event and we are flying in the director, Porter Erisman, to join us!

A big thanks to EO Philippines and Amazon AWS for sponsoring the event along with us to make it happen. While the event is invite only, we are giving away 2 tickets – all you need to do is head over to the PayrollHero Facebook page and comment on why you should be chosen to attend. We will pick two lucky people to join us.

About Crocodile in the Yangtze:

Crocodile in the Yangtze follows China’s first Internet entrepreneur and former English teacher, Jack Ma, as he battles US giant eBay on the way to building China’s first global Internet company, Alibaba Group. An independent memoir written, directed and produced by an American who worked in Ma’s company for eight years, Crocodile in the Yangtze captures the emotional ups and downs of life in a Chinese Internet startup at a time when the Internet brought China face-to-face with the West.

Crocodile in the Yangtze draws on 200 hours of archival footage filmed by over 35 sources between 1995 and 2009. The film presents a strikingly candid portrait of Ma and his company, told from the point of view of an American fly on a Chinese wall who witnessed the successes and the mistakes Alibaba encountered as it grew from a small apartment into a global company employing 16,000 staff.

PayrollHero Adventure Engineering Team Grows By +1

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

It’s not hard to imagine why people love to visit Beautiful British Columbia. With mountains, ocean and dozens of reasons to spend time indoors and out, those of us who live here count ourselves lucky, and those who visit can’t wait to come back.

Andrew Narkewicz joins PayrollHero

PayrollHero‘s newest staff member is Andrew Narkewicz – a Full Stack Ruby Engineer who tends to live in Ops – thrilled with his career move to PayrollHero in Whistler, where we are headquartered. Andrew attended UBC in Computer Science and most recently worked for Versapay as their Lead infrastructure developer.

What’s a typical work day like, at PayrollHero? There is no typical around here! We know that we get the best ideas from our talented recruits by giving them flexibility. Whether it’s 4-days-on and 3-days-off, or working weekends instead of only weekdays to take advantage time on the hill when the snow is best and the lines are shortest, or longer days with extra time banked for that great pow day, or a long weekend every couple of weeks. Flex-time is even more enticing when you live where the activities seem limitless, and your everyday life feels like a vacation… or at least looks like it to the outside world!

Blackcomb Mountain Pow

Whistler is proving to be a fantastic place to build a business: with its reasonable cost of living, rent, and ease of recruiting people to live and work in a veritable paradise. Whistler is a natural choice for Andrew, originally from Colorado. He loves ‘sledding’ (a casual term given to snowmobiling), which Whistler’s backcountry has plenty of room for! Andrew has joined us to live the best “Whistler Lifestyle” he can, taking every opportunity to play outside, with our blessing!

Don’t think we’re not hard at work, here at PayrollHero! Just because we post [seemingly constant] photos of our adventures doesn’t mean we don’t put in our dues! We’re busy at work, but we set up our business to attract and retain the best sales engineers, developers, iOS and Machine learning engineers, and customer service reps, so that we can create, build and maintain a great web-based payroll program.

Are you fit to be our next Whistler Engineering Team Hero? We are always looking for new teammates – at the office and at play! Drop us a line!

Vancouver JS Meetup Recap

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

This is a post from PayrollHero Senior Engineer Suman Mukherjee who recently arrived in Whistler, Canada from the Manila, Philippines office. #AdventureEngineer

On February 12th, the PayrollHero dev team in Whistler travelled down to Vancouver to attend the Vancouver JS meetup. We reached town a bit early, so we spent some time coworking from Launch Academy. Later in the evening, we went to SFU Harbour Center where the event was being held. Around 150 people attended the event. Two top notch speakers presented in the meetup. Robert W. Hurst of Chloi presented a talk on LucidJS and Perter McLachLan of Mobify presented a talk on Mobile performance.

Robert’s talk on Lucid started with giving us some background of event driven programming, how events are emitted and handled and we can structure our javascript around that pattern. Then he introduced LucidJS, a library, that he has been working on. Lucid allows you to set custom event, chain your events and even pipe your events together. Lucid also successfully handles subevents. The event emitters in Lucid also provide meta information about the event bindings and triggering. The library lets you encapsulate any object (not restricted to DOM nodes) and turn it into an event emitter. Specifically when used with DOM elements it allows you to take full advantage of the meta events. Robert’s talk gave us some new insights into the world of event driven programming.

Peter was the second speaker. Peter’s talk was mainly focussed on performances of apps on the mobile browsers. He shared the concept of adaptive websites, one that is not only responsive, but adapts itself based on the device. He discussed several strategies to optimize client side performance like trying to minimize JS and maximize the use of CSS, conditionally loading assets and keeping the DOM tree light so that it is easy to parse, simple CSS selectors, watch out for libraries that generate lengthy CSS selectors etc. Peter shared a list of common JS functions which restructures the DOM and how that affects the performance on mobile devices. He also discussed some other low hanging fruits like gzipping resources and non blocking scripts in the beginning of the page. This can bring returns at the lowest cost. He also showed us how the optimization strategy of domain sharding has become an anti-pattern. He also discussed how in some cases prefetching resources based on a user’s common pattern of navigating a website can be very effective in delivering content faster. Peter’s slides are also available on speakerdeck.

Both the speakers were awesome. It was the first meetup I attended in Vancouver and totally loved it. Those who love JS and are live close to Vancouver can sign up for the VanJS meetup group here.

– Suman.

Press Release: PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding To Continue Product Development And Expand Sales/Marketing Efforts In Southeast Asia

PayrollHero’s time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution helps companies manage their workforce through a cloud based, web and mobile solution that is built for today’s employees.

SINGAPORE, Feb. 20th 2013 – PayrollHero, a software company focused on time, attendance, scheduling and payroll for Southeast Asia has announced today that is has closed a $1M CAD seed round of funding from 500Startups, LX Ventures, The Futura Corporation, 8capita Partners, Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Dan Martell (CEO of Clarity), Benjamin Joffe (aka Mr. Asia), Christian Cotichini (Founder of MAKE Technologies) and other angel investors.

With offices in Manila, Philippines and Whistler, Canada, PayrollHero is a subscription based cloud software platform that uses the employees face and GPS location as the metric for clocking in and out to ensure that the right employee is in the right place at the right time. The company enables transparency between employees and management around time, attendance, scheduling and payroll via attendance analytics.

PayrollHero was created out of necessity from company founders Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger. They had set up a Philippine outsourcing company and could not find a suitable time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution so ended up building their own. After showing their internal system to other business owners in the Philippines who expressed similar dissatisfaction with the options available they decided to look deeper into the Philippine market and the rest of Southeast Asia.

“There was a really big opportunity in Southeast Asia for a time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution that was in the cloud and built for web and mobile. We set up PayrollHero and set out to become the market leader in this space,” said PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson.

PayrollHero currently supports payroll for companies in the Philippines and plans to expand its payroll capabilities to other countries within Southeast Asia in the near future. The companies time, attendance and scheduling solution works worldwide and currently has users in Canada, USA, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.

“We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines

With this injection of funds, PayrollHero can add talent to its “Adventure Engineering” team and continue to add new clients to its expanding client base.

“PayrollHero makes payroll sexy, and they make lots of money doing it! It’s one of those few cloud-based services that every business, from SMB’s to large enterprises, can and should use to increase productivity and save costs. The ability to scale PayrollHero is limited only by the number of businesses that want to improve employee attendance, scheduling, and payroll,” said George Kellerman, Venture Partner, 500 Startups

For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com

About PayrollHero
PayrollHero.com – Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness
Consumer-friendly Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll in the cloud for web and mobile.
We use your employees face as our primary biometric to avoid buddy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to your companies corollaries between productivity and mood. For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com – http://www.payrollhero.com/press_kit

Couchbase Vancouver Dev Day

Posted on January 30, 2013 by

Last Friday I travelled down to Vancouver for the Couchbase Vancouver Developer Day. Just having joined the PayrollHero dev team, I was keen to learn about the NoSQL style of database, and Couchbase in particular since we currently use it in PayrollHero.

The goal of the day was to introduce developers to Couchbase 2.0, give them a basic understanding of how to set it up and use it, and then tackle some tougher areas such as how to query the data using views. The seminar was run by 3 developers from Couchbase – Technical Evangelists Tugdual Grall & Jasdeep Jaitla, and .NET Developer Advocate John Zablocki. It was interesting to see the mix of developers attending the seminar – most mainstream programming languages were represented including Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Python and even node.js and Go. Amazingly there was some form of SDK for each of these languages, whether official or community created, proving just how much open source community support Couchbase has.

from John Zablocki’s Twitter: http://sdrv.ms/VyHHz4

The morning was spent going through the features found in Couchbase 2.0 with Tugdual. He ran us through the core principles of Couchbase Server – easy scalability, consistent high performance, no downtime and a flexible data model, before discussing the new architecture and features of Couchbase 2.0.

One of the features I found particularly impressive was how Couchbase handles server faults by replicating across nodes in a server cluster. The Couchbase client library detects when requests to a server within your cluster are failing, automatically promotes replicas of the requested documents on the remaining servers in the cluster to be active documents, and then rebalances the documents across the remaining servers. Added to this is the ease in which you can replicate your data across data centers using Cross Data Center Replication (XDCR), meaning if your data center on the west coast of the country goes down entirely, you can ramp up your clusters on the east coast of the country without losing any data whatsoever. An extension of XDCR is the ability to set up an Elastic Search cluster for providing scalable, real-time searching of documents. You can see that a lot of work has gone into making this as painless to set up as possible.

Installing Couchbase 2.0 was just as painless – well at least for us Ruby guys. The PHP guys seemed to have a fair bit more trouble (the price paid for still using PHP!) and any guys running 32-bit Windows were pretty much out of luck. WIth Rails, its as simple as downloading and running the server, installing the libcouchbase library, and installing the couchbase gem. Done.

After everyone had Couchbase 2.0 installed and set up for their various environments, we started to run through some labs to teach us the basics of Couchbase – connecting to the database, setting and retrieving documents, using atomic counters and optimistic locking, and observing when data has been pushed to disk and replicated.

Jasdeep – definitely the most vocal and opinionated of the three – used some of this time to proclaim the virtues of a NoSQL solution vs a Relational Database solution. A line that stuck in my head was “I don’t care about duplicate data – I have 10 times the performance!”. And he is definitely right about that. Couchbase, like other NoSQL databases, is blindingly fast compared to MySQL or MS SQL. By caching as many documents as it can in memory, and only caching to disk those that are the least requested, it can maintain request throughput at amazing rates. “No need to write migrations, I can change the schema at anytime through my models since there is no schema”, he proclaims, before following with, “And no more joins! I hate joins.”

from Tugdual Grall’s Twitter: pic.twitter.com/1cmGxgcb

After lunch, John stepped up to take us through the most difficult area of the day – views. By using Map-Reduce views, Couchbase can create indexes of documents for quick querying. He used the ASP .NET MVC framework to take us a through a fairly standard scenario, explaining how to construct views on Couchbase server to pull back subsets of data based on ranges, groupings, counts and more. This was definitely the most brain-intensive part of the seminar, and late in the day few people had made it through the labs unscathed. For most people who are heavily experienced in relational databases, it does take a while to shift your mind into thinking the NoSQL way.

All up it was a very well run and interesting day. I particularly enjoyed hearing how the NoSQL movement evolved and how passionate the Couchbase guys are about their product. PayrollHero already has Couchbase implemented as part of our clocking capture process, and will be looking to use it in other places where we require fast performance due to heavy traffic. I look forward to using Couchbase more and further learning what makes NoSQL such a popular movement.

New Feature: Enable/Disable Email Notifications

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Now within PayrollHero you can enable and disable the email notifications that go out from the system. While you have always had the control to edit the emails, the ability to pick and choose which ones you wanted did not exist – until today. Under “settings” and “email templates” you can edit, enable and disable each individual email that PayrollHero sends out.

PayrollHero Welcomes its First Engineer in Residence!

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

Dane Natoli is the newest member to join the Payroll Hero team here in Whistler! Dane grew up in Melbourne, Australia but experienced the Whistler lifestyle for the first time in the 09/10 season during the craziness of the Winter Olympics. After the Whistler Olympics he returned home to Melbourne, Australia and re joined his job as the Software Team Lead for the Agile development shop, Lambda Software. This was all made possible by his Computer Science Degree that he received from RMIT 2007. To add to his extensive resume he also has created a website called Yaktracker, which follows his adventurous friends on their journey to drive from London, England to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia.

It’s not all work and no play for Dane! He is a huge fan of the slopes when he’s not found having a brew or enjoying some couch time with his Xbox. Lucky for Dane he is now able to put all his passions to use.

Dane joins us as apart of EIR, Engineers in Residence program. Designed to further the cultivation of one of our Engineering Core Values “Thirst for Learning”. We’ve experience that rotating engineers from different cultural backgrounds and experiences brings more to the table and enables us to continue to be agile and introduces us to different lines of thinking.

We are overjoyed to welcome Dane to our team, he is going to be a huge help. We look forward to having Dane be apart of our team and bring his personal ‘land from down under’ approach to his work life.

Oh.. what’s the deal with boots? We thought it was funny that it is common form in Whistler to leave your winter boots at the door and swap into slippers just like Mr. Rogers – no one wants a puddle at their desk.

Wanna explore a fit with the Whistler Engineering Team? We are always looking for new teammates to learn, explore and adventure with; be it at one of our offices and when playing outside! Just drop me a line and let’s chat.

PayrollHero: Philippine Feature Set

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

I was asked the other day for a list of features that PayrollHero has for Philippine companies. Here are the main features of PayrollHero for clients in the Philippines looking for Philippine payroll.

If you have questions or want to chat further about how PayrollHero can help your business – feel free to fill in the form at PayrollHero.com and we will be in touch right away.

Time:
Clock In/Out
Break In/Out
Grace Period for Lates

Attendance:
Review attendance
Resolve Attendance
Edit Attendance
Export Employee Attendance Report
Resolves Lates and Absences
Resolves Undertime
Resolves Overtime

Scheduling:
Create Shifts
Create Multiple Shifts
Schedule Calendar
Weekly Scheduler
Paid Day Off
Unpaid Day off
Scheduling Worksites (location)
Non-scheduled clock ins
Holiday
Calendar Notes/Events

Payroll:
Gross and Net Pay Calculations
Tax Computation
Government Mandated Contributions
13th month pay calculation
Calculates Pay for Special Holidays
Calculates Pay for Regular Holidays
Calculates Payroll for all kinds of Holidays
SSS, Philhealth, PagIbig reports (monthly and quarterly hardcopies)
Paysheet reports, payslip reports (Detailed and summary)
Payroll Register ( Breakdown of Payroll, this report allows to specify an arbitrary date range to report)
Bank reports (electronic and hardcopies) PH integrate to your bank own payroll program.
BIR reports (1601C, 2316, 1700, Alphalist (soon)
Employees ID Card Template with company Logo
“Various employment documents
– Government Certificate of Contribution
– Certificate of Employment”
Various Forms ( for employees application in various Government agencies) BIR 1902 ( TIN application, SSSE1 ( SSS application), Philhealth M1A ( Philhealth application), Pag-Ibig FPF090 MDF ( Pag-Ibig application).

Philippine Payroll File Support:
Maybank
BPI
BDO
HSBC
RCBC

Analytics:
Leaderboard
Weather vs Attendance
Home Location vs Attendance

Philippines CyberPress Awards PayrollHero “IT Startup of the Year”

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

The I.T. Journalists Association of the Philippines, also known as CyberPress, held its annual awards ceremony at the Arts in the City events center in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig the other night. The event saw the country’s top technology journalists, guests from the IT industry, PR firms and partners gather for the year end celebration and the annual CyberPress Awards recognizing the Philippines’ top I.T. company, startup, product, story and Lifetime achievement awardee for the year.

It is a great honor that PayrollHero was chosen as the IT Startup Of The Year!

From the press release… “Payroll Hero, a Filipino start-up that is making a name in the international scene, was selected as “IT Start-up of the Year.” Payroll Hero uses employees face as primary biometric to avoid bundy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to companies corollaries between productivity and mood.”

The 2012 Winners:

I.T. Company Of The Year – Samsung Philippines
I.T. Product Of The Year – DOST’s Project Noah
I.T. Startup Of The Year – PayrollHero.com
I.T. Story Of The Year – Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012
Lifetime Achievement Awardee – Diosdado “Dado” Banatao

—
Official Press Release (via daddyjoey.com):

CyberPress Fetes 2012’s Best In Local IT

For launching a number of hit products that allowed the company to dominate the consumer tech market, Samsung Philippines was cited as “IT Company of the Year” by the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines, also known as Cyberpress, during a recent awards ceremony in Taguig City.

The South Korean firm, which rolled out this year popular devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S3and the Samsung Note II, beat tech behemoth IBM Philippines by the slimmest of margins to take the crown.

IBM Philippines celebrated its 75th anniversary this year and was an early front-runner in the race. Known by the moniker “Big Blue”, the company brought in this year Sam Palmisano, its former CEO and chair in the Philippines, and opened two new offices in Davao and Clark, Pampanga.

Although it narrowly lost out to Samsung as the country’s top tech firm, IBM’s first female local chief was named “IT Executive of the Year” by the Cyberpress. Mariels Almeda Winhoffer, who is in her first year in office, was recognized by the IT scribes for deftly leading the company in a number of initiatives, particularly in building up the Philippines as the social analytics hub of IBM.

The DOST’s Project Noah was adjudged as “IT Product of the Year”, a pioneering program that contributed in saving thousands of lives in a year that saw devastating typhoons pummel the country.

Payroll Hero, a Filipino start-up that is making a name in the international scene, was selected as “IT Start-up of the Year.” Payroll Hero uses employees face as primary biometric to avoid bundy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to companies corollaries between productivity and mood.

The passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which set off a wave of protests from Pinoy netizens, was the runaway choice as “IT Story of the Year”.

Honored as this year’s “Lifetime Achievement Awardee” for his meritorious contributions to the local and global IT industry is Silicon Valley-based Filipino tech icon Diosdado “Dado” Banatao.

Banatao, who is currently chairman of PhilDev Forum, pioneered a number of PC technologies such as the graphics accelerator chip that are still being used in the high-tech industry. His brother, Victor, received the plaque in his behalf.

Also during the awards night, members of the Cyberpress raised more than P40,000 for victims of Typhoon ‘Pablo’ by auctioning off three major raffle prizes (iPhone 5 from Globe Telecom, iPad Mini from Bazinga, and an Olympus digicam from Metrobank). Chinese phonemaker ZTE, through its local distributor MSI-ECS, also donated 50 phone units for the typhoon victims.

AWS re:Invent

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Piotr Banasik

Drive from Whistler to Bellingham ~200km

Last week we went to AWS re:Invent Conference, we thought that once we get there the fun stuff will begin, but even the trip down there itself was an adventure.

We left Whistler early in the morning, to make it down to Bellingham for our 11am flight. Arrived at the airport at around 9am, stood in the line indefinitely until around 11am, we were told that the plane is late (duh), and that it will not be here for another 4h or so, great …

We packed our bags back into the cars and went to grab lunch and waste some time.

We were checking the airline website the whole time to see what the new estimated time was. Anyways, we did finally get to fly out, it was around 4pm by the time we left and around 7pm by the time we got to Vegas, we imagined our day a bit diffrently 😉

Anyways, that was Monday.

On Tuesday, I went to my Workshop session. It was a whole day security session, presented jointly by RightScale and Trend Micro. RightScale showcased their product to get everyone up to speed on how to use it and Trend Micro showcased two of their products, Deep Security and SecureCloud. Overall I didn’t get that much value from the first half, since Ubertor has been with RightScale for years and I’m pretty famillar with it. The second half was a bit more useful for me since I’ve never seen any of Trend’s products, altho I’m not sure if/when we’ll make use of them. Still it was good to understand options. A nice bonus from this session was that it came with a $200 AWS credit code, so it technically made the session cost only $300 not $500.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference. During the keynote AWS announced further reductions in S3 pricing and the introduction of their new RedShift product, which is a large scale data warehousing solution, seemingly backed by Postgesql technology. They also summarized that they have released ~100 new features last year, and they expect to double that in 2013.

(from the keynote #1 video on YouTube)

They mentioned a crazy statistic: AWS adds more servers DAILY, than Amazon owned entirely in 2003.

At the end of the day was the big re:Play party. AWS kept us well inebriated and fed throughout the event so kudos for that.

Sorry about the blurry pic 😉

Thursday was the second day of the conf. During the second keynote, the Data Pipeline service which allows easily grabbing data from a bunch of sources, churning it through a massive array of map reduce instances and dumping the result somewhere else. All this can be configured through a gui workflow builder and overall seems pretty neat. I’m not sure what we specifically can do with it, but I can definitely see applications for it if you do any log processing or whatnot daily.

Over the two days of the conf, I mostly went to security and architecture talks. My main takeaway was a bucket list of little security tweaks here and there that should make our system even more secure than it already is. As for the architecture talks; Netflix has a bit of an insane setup. They have 100’s of little applications, all managed by different teams, all at different uptime standards. Its pretty amazing what systems they put in place to basically allow any of these pieces to fail and their system to continue working.

Netflix setup looks something like this: (grabbed from their slideshare deck)

I’m looking forward to next years’s re:Invent. The cloud landscape keeps maturing every year, I remember just a few years ago the whole idea of “Cloud” didn’t even exist ….