Tales from the app development team at Steamclock.

Picture this: your design team, potentially an external agency, is excited about the excellent new fonts they’ve proposed for your brand, and they’ve secured licenses for print and web use. The new typefaces do a great job conveying your brand voice to your customers.

Ora Organic, purveyors of organic plant-based supplements, challenged us to build a high-quality iOS app for core subscribers.

Stuck on a problem? Feeling frustrated? Not sure what the duck is wrong with your code?

On most mobile app projects, networking is a pain. Over the years our team members at Steamclock have tried a half-dozen different networking libraries, and each one tended towards some combination of common problems. Too often projects end up with one giant networking file, requests that require wrappers to handle simple JSON, and painful error handling when juggling global and local errors.

Is it a game? Is it an app? Yes!

Two years ago, one of our Build It Day experiements produced a little Mac menu bar app called Quests. It let you quickly access the Github issues assigned to you. In the spirit of shipping stuff, we packaged it up and put it up for download on the App Store as a free app, business model TBD. A lot of folks found it useful, which was great!

Chances are you’ve heard of the common adage, “share work, early and often.” The benefits are clear: sharing in-progress work early on allows teams to get on the same page and avoid surprises or wasted work. Easy win, right? A lot of teams find it easier said than done.

We often have folks ask us if they should build an app. After all, this is exactly the type of work that we do at Steamclock. How could we say no?

Our team at Steamclock entered 2020 with big focus on hiring in Vancouver. We knew we wanted to avoid some of the issues that large distributed teams often suffer from. Interminable conference calls, only arrangable at the very beginning or very end of the work day. Inconsistent internet access disrupting decision-making and iteration speed. A lack of shared culture, where team members feel isolated from one another.

Over the years, Steamclock has hired pretty infrequently. Our growth has been slow and steady, and our team members tend to stick around!