Connolly Design

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.

Starting a new company can be a scary proposition, as it’s never certain that things will work as planned. So given that today is Hallowe’en, the scariest day of the year, what better time to formally announce Zeitspace, a new software product design and development consultancy.

Why start a consultancy? Well, in this case there’s a pretty specific reason: Boltmade, where I worked, was acquired by Shopify earlier this month. I loved the work that we did at Boltmade — it was great to engage with a diverse range of clients on a variety of projects. The design and technical challenges were invigorating, the people were passionate about the projects that they brought us, and there was plenty of learning along the way. It felt to me that, as much as we had achieved and as far as we had come with Boltmade, there remained so much more to do.

As well, Boltmade’s departure leaves a noticeable gap in Waterloo Region’s tech ecosystem. There’s a real need for a company that can reliably deliver design and development services to a range clients. Zeitspace is an opportunity to pick up where Boltmade left off and continue the journey. We’re excited and looking forward to helping our clients create great products.

There’ll be more details to share in the coming days and weeks and months — about the team, how we work, what we’re looking to accomplish, and much more. In the meantime, drop by and say hello!

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.