13

Mar

A quality solution with a quality team

Category : Uncategorized

When Veri Integrated Training was a Beta product for our sister training company Iresource, we knew the pain involved in ensuring consistency in course quality, communications and outputs. This gave us the basis for the exisiting sofware, but we had to improve it and ensure it was stable. With advice from our EI mentor  Alan Carey I was advised to carryout a code review….. A what ? I asked.
So basically it’s just getting another coder to have a look at the code that the first software was based on and seeing is it worthwhile going forward.
The day that my mentor asked me to do that I thought ok, I don’t know any code – its written in PHP which I don’t understand and I don’t know any other coders.
Our team had a gap and I needed to fill it.   In my office building there was a guy who I knew, who knew PHP called Brendan from  Pinpoint , I asked him  did he know anyone who was a programmer and that has got good PHP skills who might do a code review and he gave me a number for a guy from Toodle.ieShane Barrron. The same week I had started a graduate for a three month internship through WIT and from Brazil. Anna, the  graduate and I  headed down to see Shane and asked him to have a look. I liked Shane’s directness, he gave me a price some feedback and agreed to work with our Beta Client on added functionality. I didn’t look up his credentials. I had a personal reference and I thought I’ll give him a shot and see how it worked out.
This mini team, me, a pay per hour experiened PHP programmer, an intern to do the basics  work and our beta client gelled and after our second team meeting,  Shane said to me, this solution is very different and solves a real problem, we should build the new version from the ground so we can produce a really strong, stable, scalable software…. I agreed with the only issue being a huge investment and no money.
Shane had a solution, he came on board, building out the platform for equity in the business. And the kicker, he has a blue chip backgroud in software development . He was the first employee of Sonru as Technical Services Engineer. Previously was a developer with Unum, an American startup company based in Carlow. He had created his own  Perfume.ie and Toddle.com with a BSc Computer Science DCU. And the kicker … he was lead developer with Hostel World, a company that now works with over 20,000 hostels from destinations all over the globe listed on Hostelworld.com, like everything, they started small and IPO raised €180 million in 2015.
So now we had a team and we were well on the way to having a product ….
The next step.. Christmas comes and so does validation!