Every time I talk to someone about Sourcesense – a prospect, a customer, a friend, whoever – I always mention the fact that everyone is a permanent employee and we don’t usually use contractors. 90% of the times I get a strange look no matter the country I am at that particular moment (since we have offices in UK, Netherlands and Italy).

The reason for the strange look I believe lies in the fact that consulting and systems integration companies by and large tend to do a lot of body shopping (UK definition, in Italy it’s called body rental): contracting people off the street just to resell them to customers, most of the time doing so after having already sold the bodies to the customers.

When I get the inevitable question “really?” and the occasional “why?!?!?” I usually jump at the chance to explain our point of view but it’s always a long discussion. I was thinking about this last week after the situation presented itself again and thanks to way too much air travel I got to the following concise, arguably bold explanations, both probably unconsciously inspired by something I read sometime ago about Pixar:

We aspire to be the home for all Open Source developers who want to create customer value by and while contributing to the ecosystem: to do so we need to blend individual stars and operating systems that matches up with that strategy. Try doing that we random people you either don’t know and drop at the end of an engagement or that are in any case not part of your organisation. Great people tend to generate the most value when they can see beyond their little part of the universe (e.g. I love it when I offer to a colleague to go to a conference and, as part of his/her happy reaction, he/she asks things like “is it a good thing for the company if I go? does it make financial sense?”)

Contracts allow (consulting/systems integration) companies to be irresponsible: since you don’t need to worry about keeping people happy and fulfilled. What we strive for in Sourcesense is to create a workplace that’s better than any contract. And it’s not just a matter of idealism, there are long term returns as well that I can prove: more than once a customer has thanked me because – their words – “rather than selling me anything and the kitchen sink you preferred to be honest and avoid selling us someone off the street”. The result is not only a happy customer, it’s a relationship based on trust and professionalism that pays over and over again.

As I briefly mentioned in this post I founded a company called OSWay – The Open Source Way – back in 2000 with a friend of mine, exactly 10 years ago!

A bit of history: in 1997 I went live with my first ever website on Geocities, it was called C++Warriors and it was all about…C++ News, articles and tutorials were in Italian and that was a scarse resource at the time so much so that it got featured on a few magazine (the physical ones!) and got quite some traction. That’s when I met all kinds of interesting people like Alex Martelli of Python and Google fame (at the time he was able to spit out a 30-part tutorial on Win32 programming in a matter of days) and Ugo Landini to name a few.

In 1998 I started thinking about the success of C++Warriors and decided that if a little amateurish website about C++ was so successful it was due to the sheer lack of programming resources in Italian and I started planning what would then become Programmazione.it in 1999 (although I have nothing to do with it since 2003 it still exists and it’s 11 years old now!): the first Italian website about programming with news, articles, tutorials and soft dev product reviews all in Italian.

To do that I needed to find people willing to write and publish material in Italian about as many programming languages as possible and that’s when I met Filippo on the #programmazione IRCNet channel in 1998 who will then become my business partner in both Programmazione.it and OSWay (I now regret a lot letting osway.com, .net, .org and .it expire a few years ago )

At the end of 1999 Filippo and I also started working together for a few customers and came up with a product idea around “making information free”, sharing and collaborating on-line, etc, etc (all pretty common stuff nowadays), founded OSWay S.r.l., sold part of it to a public company to get some capital and invest it into the product development. We eventually froze the product and kept working as a software house specialised in the use of Open Source. We did all sorts of things from partnering with SuSe Italy, to developing the world first Kylix enterprise-grade POS application (there used to be our case history on Borland‘s website before the CodeGear split), community websites in Java and PHP (Freestation.it), Linux-based embedded software for touch-screen, industrial-rugged appliances and more.

We started working on the product a few months before incorporating but we eventually incorporated in September 2000, exactly 10 years ago!!

There are many noteworthy things about that venture, including the fact that Open Source was at the center of everything we did, starting from the company very own name 3 years before the Open Source Initiative adopted bylaws and applied for recognition as 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2003 but I just wanted to celebrate the 10th aniversary with a post and this is it

UPDATE: Filippo dug out the flash teaser that we prepared in 2000 for OSWay and the product. Yes, it’s flash and yes it’s heavy but it’s still beautiful!

» Read more: OSWay 10 years later

Last weekend I read Rework, the new book by 37Signals and as I tweeted: “nice although nothing new if you’ve been following stuff like Agile, Getting Real, Guy Kawasaki, Lean Startup, etc”. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading even if you indeed have been following all those things and more for it’s a very enjoyable read, it’s easy to find yourself going back and re-reading bits and pieces but most importantly it helps you reflect and what you‘ve been doing lately.

There are many things that resonate with me and among those one in particular that nicely summarises what I’ve been doing for at least the last 4 months in Sourcesense UK: “Focus on what won’t change”

If you visit our old and a little stale website (currently working on a complete refresh) you are likely to end up with something along the lines of: “ok, these guys do Open Source stuff and Agile stuff across Europe, have a number of Open Source partners all over the place and employ as many OSS committers as possible” which is cool but doesn’t really tell you much about why you should engage with us rather than someone else that “does Open Source stuff and Agile stuff”, does it?

So we started an exercise of introspection plus some pie-in-the-sky thinking to answer questions like: what don’t we want to change? what do we want to build on top of? what are we really good at? what are the gaps from here to there? how can we fill those gaps? and so forth.

We came up with the following:

and although this was intended for internal use and therefore assumes all kinds of background knowledge you likely don’t have, I’ll do my best to describe it and, more importantly, draw a line where “things won’t change”.

Sourcesense is built on top of 2 pillars if you will, and these are never going to change because that’s what we are good at, what we enjoy doing and what we can pour ourselves as people into so that we can “Decommoditize our product” – another Rework essay. Those pillars are:

• Software Craftsmanship
• Open Source

While the former is hard to achieve but easy enough to understand (good starting points here and here), the latter is less obvious than you may think therefore I’m going to expand on it later in this post.

Going quickly over the rest before getting to the meat: the 2 pillars are then sort of wrapped by what I’m calling ALM for lack of a better term: it’s simply the collection of tools, processes/approaches/methods and ideas we like to use day in, day out. On top of this block there are the domains we specialise in: Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence but I won’t be writing about these in this post as they are not part of what won’t ever change. Everything is topped off by good consulting skills since one thing is being great developers and another is being great consultants: we want to be both to the advantage of our customers.

The Open Source block

I’m not just referring to “the code is available and is free” here, but more importantly to the belief that there is much more to Open Source than just software. Or to be more blunt: we believe Open Source is only a byproduct of participation. Would be stupid of me to spend hours trying to distill this when I can reuse something Gianugo Rabellino wrote sometime ago in an internal discussion thread:

“What we strive to do is helping companies making sense of Open Source, companies that maybe initially are driven by price pressure but more and more oriented today towards a better understanding of the dynamics of doing things together. Our job is having them come for the price, and stay for the community. Or drive them directly to the community, that works as well – as long as they understand the new way of dealing with technology and how that should open conversations rather than confrontations.

That’s an ambitious goal, and something well out of our reach unless we fully understand the Open Source world. This is why we live and breathe by committers, people who know how to read a license, people who are not scared to participate in a group, people who know how to reach for help and contribute solutions. Our Open Source consultants need to have a firm grasp of what Open Source can provide, and try to pilot the big corporation ships into the open port by telling them when to watch out and what is the best place to steer. In a nutshell, the Open Source side of Sourcesense is our understanding of the group dynamics behind software today. We know how to choose software beyond the technology bit, and we understand when we are talking about open source, and when open source is just smoke and mirrors.

To that extent, and using the openness gauge to measure solutions out there, we try and find the best compromise between good technologies, open vendors listening to their customers and the community and yes, market reach and momentum because at the end of the day we need to pay the bills and we like easy wins from time to time. We then end up with a suite of products which, to different degrees, are Open as open can mean.”

That’s what won’t change in Sourcesense because that’s what we are and we believe in.

I know it’s a cliché but indeed I cannot believe 1 year has already gone by! My ‘A new challenge‘ post was published on Monday 16th March 2009, the day I left ThoughtWorks and joined Sourcesense as the new UK managing director.

Next Monday will be the first day of my second year and as it happens such a milestone is a good point for some reflection and although not everything can go into a blog post (either because it’s too long, too detailed, too hard to put down in words or simply private), I want to try and list the major good and not so good points of this ride:

Good

• since March 16th 2009 Sourcesense UK has hired 8 great new people (and is currently looking for more on both the sales and technical side): Huw, Tom, Peter, Nigel, Gustavo, Edoardo, Vikrant + an unnamed one who is starting shortly. If you consider that I spent the first 4 months getting up to speed, looking after existing customers and slowly building a vision for the UK office, that means we hired an average of 1 person per month and because we are very picky (remember, I come from ThoughtWorks ) that means interviewing something like 52 people to narrow down this 8. Although we are looking to hire more soon – in fact contact me if you are a software crafts(wo)men who love Open Source - I feel we have a great team in place now, and our customers agree!
• One of my goals has always been to build a truly multicultural office and we are getting there as we’ve got: Italians, British, Brazilians, Slovaks, Indians. As you might have noticed already though we only have men, I’ll expand on this in the not so good points.
• One of those 8, Peter, was in fact our guinea pig for internships. I wrote briefly about it back in August. I say guinea pig because Peter was the first one to go through a completely new idea never tried before and not happy with that we also split his time between London and Milan. I know for a fact that next time we do offer an internship we will do much better…
• At any given time we’ve had at least 2 colleagues from the other offices (Amsterdam, Milan and Rome) working for UK customers either remotely or here in London and at some point there were more than 6! On top of that we are consistently working with 3 or 4 trusted contractors who, for whatever reason, prefer this type of contract (and not for lack of trying on my part! I love permanent people so that we can invest on them for the long term)


London office

• We moved into a new office opposite Spitalfields Market and I cannot tell you enough how much I love the location: great transports (Liverpool Street Station), easy to reach from airports and packed full of bars, pubs, restaurants, the market and shops. Oh yes, it’s also in the City
• Every Last Wednesday of the month we all meet up in office from 5.30pm and talk over pizza and beers. I go through last month results being as transparent as possible disclosing all the numbers, discussing what’s coming up, new ideas, proposals and so forth and then leave the stage to whoever wants to present something they care about: technical stuff (from Scala to Lucene), customer stuff (what’s going on with project X), partners stuff (we had a partner of ours delivering a private webinar on their technology just for us). Of course we then head to a pub to keep talking and socialising
• It looks like slowly but surely we are heading in the right direction since we get more and more work of the type we like and less and less of the “not that interesting but it will help pay the bills” type. This can only be a good thing!
• We had an energising OneCompany meeting in Amsterdam back in October: everyone flew in from the various offices and we spent a day in a beach house and a day in the beautiful Amsterdam office.

Amsterdam Office

Beach House

Kites by the beach

Not so good

• We are all men! I care about diversity and I’ve worked with some pretty amazing women in the past (across the board, including developers) therefore one of my goals for this year is to try and recruit some of the best female geeks in town. I’m lucky because London is a great place for this and there are plenty of opportunities like London Girl Geek Dinners and Women in Technology
  
• It’s always hard when new hires don’t work out and usually it’s whoever recruited them fault, in this case mine! With one guy, after the standard 3-month probation period, we decided to part ways because we realised we weren’t a good fit: what Sourcesense UK needed at the time didn’t match with where he was in his career. The thing I’m happy about is that we are still in touch (twitter, buzz, email). That’s what happens when you try your best to be transparent and up front.
• This one goes with the nature of the business but it’s hard at times to make sure everyone feels part of the same entity when half the people are working on a customer site, some are working from our office and some others run around multiple customers offices. Last Wednesday, regular one-on-ones, company meetings and other activities are all geared towards overcoming this issue but I still feel like we need to do more and we will.

I’m sure the moment I publish this I’ll remember another 50 or so things but I guess the fact that the ones above come to my mind immediately makes them the most important ones to me.

Looking forward to an even better second year!