Year: 2017

As I’ve written previously, our stated business at Zeitspace is designing and building great software products for our clients. And 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.

In support of those activities, Zeitspace has been busy! We’ve done some project work for great clients, run some Zeitspace Sessions for the community, and done some good along the way.

We need help doing all that, though, and to that end we’re growing our team. If you’re a designer or developer who is passionate about learning new things and working together on exciting problems, then we’d like you to consider joining our delightfully inclusive team. Check out our career opportunities, and get in touch with us.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

It’s an exciting day here at Zeitspace, as yesterday one of our projects launched in a very public way.

SHORE Centre is a Kitchener-based not-for-profit that has provided judgement-free sexual health information and support to people in our community for decades. Zeitspace worked with SHORE to create a web app called Choice Connect, a new way to access their abortion provider referral service. We designed and developed this software app, which provides trusted referrals to clinics and hospitals for women who need them. Moreover, we provided our design and development services to SHORE Centre free of charge, though for us that’s the least interesting part of this story.

Why did we decide to work for SHORE this way? There are a few reasons.

What they’re doing is important. Abortion remains a controversial subject in Canada. As a result, access to one is needlessly difficult in Waterloo Region, adding stress to an already stressful situation for any woman who makes the choice to get one. SHORE has a simple mission is “to promote choice through accurate sexual health education and confidential pregnancy options support”. As human beings living in the Region, we find that pretty compelling.

Lyndsey Butcher, the Executive Director of SHORE Centre, impressed us tremendously. She’s smart, articulate, and a passionate advocate for the work that SHORE does. And when we met she had definitely done some homework in defining what SHORE needed in order to support providing referrals for women to abortion providers; she had recently gone through the Fierce Founders program at Communitech. She’s also persuasive!

We realized that our work would have a big impact on an under-resourced organization and the people it serves. When we understood what Lyndsey was hoping to create, we realized that Zeitspace could help. We started by creating a prototype to help SHORE Centre raise money to build the real thing. When funding didn’t materialize we then decided to just go ahead and build the real thing. Neither the design and creation of the prototype nor building the real application would be burdensome for us — we would do the work during breaks in our regular project work. And we knew that the impact would be immediate, direct, and big, as SHORE could never have done this on their own.

But the impact wasn’t just on SHORE and its stakeholders.

Our experience helping SHORE had a direct impact on how we think about Zeitspace, the work we do, and our place in the world. As a young company (we celebrated our first birthday this past Hallowe’en) we’re still finding our way and figuring out how to work and be a part of our community/communities. The experience of working with SHORE provided us with a viable model for doing good work in our community, while applying our craft and doing what we love to do. And now that we know how the model could work, we’re going to continue to refine it and engage with organizations for whom we think we can make an impact. We’ve embraced the notion of devoting our “excess capacity” to have an impact on our community.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

When I was at Boltmade, we regularly ran workshops in which various team members shared their knowledge with the community on a range of topics. Early on, I suggested presenting these events under the umbrella name Boltmade Sessions, inspired by music sessions where players gathered to explore and create music together. It seems only natural to pick up that idea and run with it here at Zeitspace.

Today we’re introducing The Zeitspace Sessions, a series of events intended to share our collective knowledge with the community, and learn something ourselves along the way. We’ll cover topics that matter to us here, with an emphasis on user experience, software development, and product. And we’ll all learn from everyone on the Zeitspace team.

The Zeitspace Sessions launch on July 26 with Introduction to User Story Mapping Workshop. Join us — you won’t want to miss out.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

Zeitspace has been a gratifying success story since launching last Hallowe’en. We’ve had interesting projects, hit our stride as a productive team, and made an impact on our clients’ products. There’s always room for improvement, though, and always new opportunities to seize. That’s the nature of a good story.

I’m delighted with the most recent development in our story, which is that Jeff Fedor is joining me as my partner at Zeitspace. Jeff and I have known each other a little for twenty years, and have watched each other’s journeys through the tech product world with admiration. More recently, an exploratory chat over beer became several more chats over beer and, well, here we are.

Our skills and experiences are complementary and this joining together has, in hindsight, an element of inevitability to it. Jeff brings a product focus that’s a perfect complement to Zeitspace’s software design and development capabilities, further enhancing our ability to help our client’s ship the right thing.

We’re excited about all the possibilities.

And we’re delighted to be marking the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation in our own way, announcing this new chapter for Zeitspace on a holiday long weekend.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

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.