Our Blog

I just signed up for a free account and tried out Pivotal Tracker and I must say I agree with the testimonials I saw on the site. Having been used to Basecamp for a couple of years, it was a very different experience and philosophy but I got a hang of it pretty quick. Here the main things I like about it so far:

• Its Free
• Its web-based
• Its puts everything for everyone on the project on the very same page. I am big fan of Excel and use it very creatively for a ton of things and love to see everything on the same screen.
• Its JS based and super fast like Gmail
• Its realtime so everyone on the team can see the changes happening in real time
• It took me 2 mins to get started and understand the concept of stories, icebox etc. by just clicking around. Easy to get started.

The testimonials on their site is what made me try though. Some pretty impressive people giving it a thumps up:

“We are using Pivotal Tracker to manage all of our new web apps under development, this thing rocks. It has a very nice workflow and has really helped us know what other team members are working on and to know what our velocity of development is. ”
- Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Founder and Senior Fellow, Engine Yard

“Pivotal Tracker is a fantastic product. We’ve become a more efficient development team since we started using it. And even better, the management team gets on-demand visibility into my team’s priorities and accomplishments. ”
- Jim Gochee, VP Engineering, New Relic

“Tracker is the ideal story tracking tool for truly Agile/XP environments. Its slim feature set keeps you focused on stories and velocity, rather than distracted with nuances and overloaded features and process. Being Agile is about keeping energy focused on writing code, not burning cycles on tools that turn out more and more process. Tracker’s sweet spot is its concise, lightweight, only-what-you-need, user interface. I’m a fanboy.”
- Jud Valeski, CTO, GNIP

Share your comments here and I will be sure to share more on how we leverage it internally.

Google Insights graphs have been all over the blogosphere after Andrew Chen posted thoughts about popular websites which may be driven largely by Silicon Valley early adopters. I played with Google Insights a couple of months back, and recently have been looking at it more closely to analyze a bunch of different thing, including where do we look for good Ruby on Rails developers in India, to hire at our Pune office. Its funny how the data from Google Insights (see below) matches closely to our own recruitment efforts as well as that of our head hunters.

I restricted the search by “Computers & Electronics” category to take out any unrelated matching terms. I also tested with “ruby on rails” search term with and without quotes. Karnataka state ranked the highest which was expected with Bangalore being the largest software hub in India, followed by Kerala, Gujrat and Maharastra. I was surprised to see Kerala and Gujrat rank above Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu (Chennai has a pretty large Ruby group, or atleast it had in the past) rank lower in the list. But if we assume search keywords being indicative of skills or people cultivating those skills (for software/language keywords) then this is insight from Insights is a pretty good insight for everyone who is looking for Ruby on Rails developers in India. It helps you understand which areas in the country has talent that is upto speed with the latest in open source.

I pulled up a chart for python and that came up as expected as well with a few new insights that I didn’t know. Looking at python and ruby on rails charts, helps find areas in the country where you can find early adopters of new technology, who can potentially also be a good fit for startup founders looking to hire or outsource product development to India.

.NET is pretty widespread in the country Andhra Pradesh leading the list, and so is Java with Karantaka leading the list. I think this can be a great resource for companies and recruiters in India to leverage to figure out where they can find what kind of talent and plan accordingly.