Company spotlight - Featurist

So I mentioned that I'd joined a start-up in London, what I didn't mention is that I'm effectively employee #1 at this place even though they've been going for quite a while now.

So how have we managed to get this far without any full-time staff of our own?

Enter Featurist

Featurist are a band of contractors/consultants/hit-team/merry-men who join companies as a team and build software. Right now they've been building stuff with us whilst working on other more enterprisy .NET contracts.

Normally at companies who consider themselves ".NET shops", you'll get one or two really good people and then a big pile of others who slow the whole thing down whether it be intentional or through general incompetence. Now I'm sat in a room of half a dozen of these folks and it's completely bizarre to find yourself saying "I believe in this one thing", and having a whole team of people presenting rational and thought out cases for and against your view point.

Now, at this start-up we're pretty much slinging Ruby all over the show (And boy am I hating on the Ruby the past couple of weeks), and I'm finding myself needing these guys a lot to help me do things the "correct" way in this environment. I whine and moan about this all of the time and they've done a remarkable job of seeing through that and getting on and building stuff with me. (Did I mention I really hate ruby, and bundler, and rails? I do all the time in the office and on Twitter).

What I've not done is tell them all how amazing they are, and sadly whining and being negative about the 5% often outweighs the other 95% of positivity so I'm sticking the positive stuff up in this blog entry for everybody to see. (No, I'm not on commission)

Featurist are great

• Have a look at their Github, this is not the standard .NET consultancy fare - they're out there doing stuff - both interesting and useful in a variety of technologies. They're busy having opinions and using those opinions to help companies build better software - it's pretty rad.
• As far as temperament goes, I've never met a group who have managed to mix being "chilled out about things" with "we still care about software and building software" in quite the way they have (Unlike me who have the latter but not the former to my detriment)
• Quality? They've got it - I might bitch about the rails monolith but truth be told this project is about 10000% better than most of the projects I've ever come in onto this late in the game - and this is almost 100% down to the work of Featurist.
• Culture? Easy going, keeping things mixed up (I made fun of them for moving desks every day but it keeps things interesting and the cynic in me be damned), focused on keeping processes lightweight but visible and shipping regularly - all those things that are easy to say and hard to do.

Hire them

If your company needs help (whether you're a start-up or established software house), you could do far worse than to get in touch with Featurist to see how they could help you - it's worth it.