A blog by Mark Connolly
Pretty clearly I’ve not been writing regularly here. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been blogging at all. I’ve been writing over at the Zeitspace blog instead. I had made a half-hearted effort to cross-post here as well, but clearly haven’t kept it up. Anyway, for now posting here is going to maintain the infrequent activity, but at least there’s this post acknowledging that!
Please join me over at the Zeitspace blog.
The last couple of weeks have been busy ones at Zeitspace, with things getting especially hectic last Monday.
That’s when we started a new phase in our existence with a move from Distillery Labs (the old Brick Brewing building in Waterloo) to a new location at 305 King Street West in downtown Kitchener. That’s just a short walk away from the Tannery, home to Comunitech, D2L, and many more of the companies that give Waterloo Region such a vibrant tech community. In fact, the view in the photo above isn’t of 305 King, but of the Tannery from our window! Many thanks to our friends at Overlap Asscociates for the invitation to co-locate with them.
And, as if the move wasn’t enough, on our first day in the new office, we welcomed three new co-op software engineers to the team. I’ll write more about them in the near future, but for now it’s great to see that they’ve dived into our project work with such enthusiasm!
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.
Last fall I travelled to Mountain View, California, for the Google Developer Experts Summit. While there, I was immersed in a day-long Design Sprint Master Academy session facilitated by a team led by Kai Haley, whom I knew from her Fluxible 2016 sessions. The academy was the first step in a process that reached a milestone this past week when I was designated a Google Certified Sprint Master.
In the grand scheme of things, such a designation doesn’t mean that much. Within the narrower world of what I do, though, and what we do at Zeitspace, it’s a nice recognition of our expertise. And it’s undoutedly relevant in the near term as I’ll be delivering a one-day design sprint workshop as part of the Tech Leadership Conference that Communitech is presenting next month. It should be a fun session!
This post originally appeared on the Fluxible website.
Last Hallowe’en we launched Zeitspace. In the five months since then we’ve had some great people join the company, and we’ve engaged in wonderful projects with clients who are as passionate about creating great software products as we are. It’s been an exciting time.
Zeitspace inherited a healthy amount of Boltmade DNA, where I had previously worked with another group of great people on a variety of projects. And we’ve been building on that inheritance as we shape Zeitspace.
Over the last few months we’ve used design sprints, user story mapping, prototypes in varying degrees of fidelity, and other design tools to get clarity and alignment on what to build. And we’ve built mobile and web apps that enable our clients to release their products out in the world.
We’ll share stories about some of our project work in the near future. In the meantime we’ll continue to focus on the thing that has kept us so busy: designing and building great software products for our clients.
And if you have a project that you’d like to talk about, get in touch! I’m always happy to chat about how Zeitspace might help make it a reality.
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.
I recently ran a design sprint for Capacity Canada, an organization based here in Waterloo Region that helps charities and other not-for-profit organizations get better at governing and otherwise running themseves. In other words, they increase the capacity of these organizations to do good work. The design sprint that I ran was aimed at a new initiative that they are exploring, which is still in its early stages. My friend Matthew Reynolds introduced me to the initiative and to Cathy Brothers of Capacity Canada, and I was delighted to be able to help them move it forward.
As a designer, I’m pretty familiar with both the constituent parts of a design sprint, as well as the overall shape and framework that Google Ventures has refined and promoted with such success. And I had taken a workshop at Google last fall that teaches their own take on the GV design sprint. (The big difference is that they take a more flexible approach in terms of scheduling and duration of sprints.) And, of course, design for user experience is pretty core to what we do at Zeitspace.
We ran the five stages of this particular sprint in three days, and the sprint team’s efforts were pretty effective at generating results. Having said that, you have to have faith in the process to know that the uncertainty and confusion that appear early on will be resolved by the end of the sprint, with answers and insights that help move the project forward! Do check out Matthew’s take on the sprint, as I’ll forego going into too many details here.
It felt good to help clarify some options and otherwise help Capacity Canada via this design sprint. We’ll see where the project goes now.
Speaking of design sprints, I’ll be running a day-long design sprint workshop for the folks at Communitech as a part of their 2017 Tech Leadership Conference. If you’re at all interested in learning more, do check it out.
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.
Fluxible now has five past editions that we can look back on with pride and fond memories. From a two-day conference in 2012 to a week-long festival in 2016, the Fluxible experience has grown richer and deeper each year, with a large community of attendees having joined us along the way.
This year, we’re again presenting Fluxible as Canada’s UX Festival, with another full week of events in three streams. We’ll present a program of Fluxible Meetups (September 18–22), a day of Fluxible Workshops (September 22), and the crowning two-day Fluxible Conference (September 23 & 24). We’re back at the CIGI Auditorium for the weekend conference, and the Communitech Hub for workshops and many meetups. In addition to all the terrific food, presentations, conversations, workshops, music, and more that you’ve come to expect, we have a few fun surprises cooking that we’re sure you’ll love.
And we’re trying something different this year for registration.
We know that many of you start budgeting for conferences and events earlier in the year than we, in the past, have announced details of our program and tickets sales. That has made for some uncertainty in planning your year. For 2017, we have a new approach that we hope addresses that.
We’re introducing Leap of Faith ticket sales for Fluxible Conference.
Why Leap of Faith? Because we’re opening up ticket sales without having announced a single speaker! How could we possibly expect anyone to register for Fluxible Conference without knowing the details? Well, with five years of Fluxible Conferences to look back on, we think we’ve established a solid record of delivering great programming married to a great experience. We believe that in making the Leap of Faith and registering now you’ll be rewarded with another terrific conference. Plus, you’ll have done so at the best price, as we’re offering our lowest cost tickets for Leap of Faith tickets. But it’s for a short time only, as we close Leap of Faith ticket sales on March 17.
So show your love for UX in general and Fluxible in particular by making the leap of faith and buying your Fluxible Conference tickets now!
This post originally appeared on the Fluxible website.
January has been a great month at Zeitspace.
As I wrote previously, our very first co-op student joined us this month. And we’re well underway with our first project, an iOS app for a local company. This morning is our weekly demo and planning session for that project, which is always something that I look forward to.
We have plenty of other interesting opportunities lining up, too. We’re now at a point where it’s time to hire our first full-time software engineer. To that end, we’ve posted a position in some of the usual places, including Waterloo Tech Jobs.
Our stated business at Zeitspace is designing and building great software products for our clients. But we’re also designing and building a great company, one where we all learn and grow as individuals and as a team. We want an environment where exploration, discovery, and craft are important for our project work, but also for our individual and company progress.
We hope you’ll consider joining us!
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.
Our first week in the office went well, coinciding as it did with the arrival of our first co-op student, Dylan. He spent his week prepping for our first client project; that involved reviewing a few tutorials, setting up a development environment, and learning about user story mapping. He also added a contact form to our updated website. Not a bad four days! We kick off the the project this week.
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.
Today marks an auspicious milestone at Zeitspace. It’s day one in our office at Distillery Labs, which is in a historic old factory building on King Street South in Waterloo, formerly the long-time home to Brick Brewing Co. The office is more than a little spartan right now, but that’s not a problem at all. We’ll make it more special in the coming weeks and months. More importantly, it gives us a place to work on our first projects. Exciting stuff.
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.
While things have been quiet on the blogging front, behind the scenes it’s been a busy few weeks as Zeitspace hit three satisfying milestones. All three land at the beginning of January.
First, we’ll be starting work on our first project. I won’t write any more about that for now, other than to state the obvious: we’re pretty excited about it!
In related news, we have our first office space. We’re setting up at Distillery Labs, which is an office space provider that’s particularly appealing to start-ups and other new ventures. The fact that we’ll be in the old Brick Brewery building near the corner of King Street South and Allen Street in Waterloo is an unexpected outcome — it’s just a few steps away from the old Boltmade location in the Bauer Building at King and Allen.
And finally, our very first co-op student — a software developer — will be starting in January. We didn’t get into the co-op macninery until November, and were delighted to have been able to find a student willing to join our brand new venture. We plan on having plenty to keep him busy.
More to come in the new year!
This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.