auberger.com

After three fascinating years shepherding development for Songbird, the popular open media player platform, I’m excited to announce that I’ve recently left the nest and embarked on a new adventure.

Throughout my career, I’ve spent many years at startups backed by top VCs (Sequoia Capital, KPCB, Atlas Venture and Sutter Hill Ventures to name a few), building engineering teams from the ground up. During those years, I discovered the best way to manage development organizations and keep them at peak performance. I’ve elaborated a unique and pragmatic approach to the balancing act of managing process, team and technology, yielding great results.

It’s been challenging, humbling and rewarding and I would do it all over again in a heart beat. I’ve come to a point where I have the desire to share that knowledge and expertise more broadly and mentor many more upcoming technical talent along the way. To that end, I’ve started a boutique software engineering consulting practice called Ternary Labs.

I’m offering a service I call “Engineering Coaching” which focuses on providing technical guidance, establishing processes and coaching engineering teams. Startups immediately benefit from an experienced VP Engineering, at a fraction of the cost and without the hassle of recruiting a full time senior executive.

Having experienced how difficult it is to find a reliable partner to outsource projects to, I also build custom software under contract. We specialize in Ruby on Rails and iPhone development. More information can be found at:

http://ternarylabs.com

If you’re trying to figure out how to organize your engineering team, experiencing growing pain, lacking good process, having problems with your technology or just need something built, give us a shout.

Over the years, we’ve taken pride in making our tools, product and development process, as open and transparent as possible. Our tools (Bugzilla, Litmus, Wiki) are publicly accessible, our source code open (svn) and we’ve blogged on many occasions about our Agile practices.

Today we’re taking a step further by publishing our Development Survival Guide. This presentation is an internal step-by-step guide that we take new engineers thru during their orientation. It’s a good summary of what to expect on a day-to-day basis as an engineer working at Songbird (other than daily Fussball tournament and unfettered access to the beer stocked mini-fridge). It’s your opportunity to take a peek from within.

Want to get even closer? Apply for one of our openings.

Download Songbird Development Survival Guide 1.2 in pdf.

Agile development methods are well suited to plan and execute near term release cycle. For instance, the tools we developed and processes we’ve adopted help us plan and steer a release to completion with a good level of accuracy and repeatability. However, there are instances when the time horizon needs to be further out than the current cycle. The need to create a budget, synchronize a roadmap with a partner or determine future hiring needs, make it necessary to have an effective mechanism for long term planning.

Fortunately, the metrics gathered during each Agile release cycle can be very helpful for that purpose. Once we gain a good understanding on what is being worked on, for how long and by how many people, we should be able to extrapolate this to forecast future releases.

Let’s take a look at what activities take place during a typical release cycle:

1) Plan release
2) Write code
3) Test
4) Fix bugs

Then repeat ad nauseam.

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