Tag: Zeitspace

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.

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.

Time is important to us at Zeitspace. It is at many organizations, of course, but it’s part our name, so it had better be important here!

We think about our product development work in many ways. One way is to divide it up into blocks of time during which we’ll execute on it. As we’re an agile organization and use scrum to organize our work, that means working in sprints. We like to use one-week sprints on our projects. The rhythm of planning, executing, and delivering in these one-week cycles is a wonderful experience for all. The uniformity of the time units in this approach is powerful.

We’re also fond of design sprints, which are similarly named but slightly different. While I was in Mountain View recently for the Google Experts Summit I was delighted to learn that the prescriptive one-week durations of the Google Ventures design sprint are relaxed within Google itself. That is, while the stages of the design sprint are critical, the choronological durations are much less so. That means that there’s room for variation in time devoted to the design sprint, which is also powerful.

Today it’s been 30 days since our Hallowe’en Zeitspace launch. Each day has brought some combination of interesting conversations, new insights, exciting opportunities, and more. There’s much to do and, happily for us, time is on our side!

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.