Today is our last day in the Berlin office before this year’s remote office. After the first iteration last year, where we stayed in beautiful Oslo for a week, we have extended the time and distance for this year: 3 weeks of San Francisco.

We’ll be working there (mostly) as usual during the days and then explore the city in the nights. For the first week we rented a beautiful apartment from where we can work and start exploring. We are still waiting for some other great place to come to us for the rest of our stay and we’ll also try out all the cool and hip coworking spaces. Apart from that we want to meet geeks and normal people, go to an apple store for the first time, maybe attend some user group events, meet with some CouchDB folks, drive across the bay … whatever comes up.

If you want us to buy you a beer, have some spare desks for a few days in your office where we could work, any hints for places/events we have to visit or know someone who might rent out an apartment please let us know in the comments. You can also follow and contact us on twitter.

updated: added sven’s point from the comments

Explaining agile to customers is hard, sometimes more, sometimes less so. In order to improve communication and make it clear what to expect and what not to I came up with the following checklist of what agile projects are about:

You DO get a working, maintainable, production ready, 100% quality piece of software in a fixed amount of time.
You do get a first working, maintainable, production ready, 100% quality version of that software after a very short time (usually 1-2 weeks).
You DO get to launch your software in time.
We DO pair program all the time to ensure that quality and it doesn’t slow us down.
We DO write automated tests to ensure that quality and it doesn’t slow us down.
You DON’T necessarily get all the features you wanted after an iteration.
That’s why it’s important that you DO prioritize what’s most important for you.
We DO estimate how long each feature will take us to implement. But it’s only an estimate.
We DON’T accept a functional specification you bring in as a basis for our work.
We DON’T believe this would work. We DON’T believe it is possible to completely specify a software upfront with tolerable effort.
We DO use your functional spec as a basis for a discussion where we’ll write down stories for each feature together with you. Those form the basis of our work.
We DO embrace changing requirements by working in short iterations.

We DO deliver successful software projects when working like this.

__________________
Signature Customer

Anything I forgot? The comments are open.

We went to Maine — well, close. To evaluate the past year and make plans for 2009, the Upstream crew recently spent a weekend together. We stayed in a holiday home right on the North Sea coast where we enjoyed the frosty weather and a cosy fireplace. Everyone brought about three cameras on average. This resulted in heaps of pictures with “naturey crap” (the amateur is speaking). See by yourself on Flickr, Tumblr and KommtMit.

Our CEOs Alex and Thilo gave a presention about Upstream’s past year. Then, our aim was to outline what Upstream should do in 2009 and how each of us wants to get involved: How much we want to work and for how much, which technologies we want to learn, does it make more sense to attend conferences or to get involved in various open source projects … we collected our ideas and discussed some of them further.

Next to talking business, we wanted to get to know each other better, so everyone had also prepared a presentation about a non-technical topic of interest:

• Alex introduced us to Sailing, “the most expensive way of travelling inconveniently”.
• Matthias talked about Photography, what else!
• Katrin gave a talk about how to recycle old consumer items by turning them into furniture, showing examples from ecoble, WebUrbanist and Lockengeloet, Hamburg.
• Thilo shared his Pen and Paper Roleplaying Game experiences by reading from his hero’s diary.
• Frank talked about Screamo, his favorite kind of Hardcore/Punk Music, with many sound snippets!
• I presented Rhythms of Resistance, a network of political samba activists.

After all those fun sessions and walking around at the beach taking pictures of every grain of sand it wasn’t so easy to get back to work but we managed —
As a first result we are today relaunching the upstream website presenting our new software development/consulting products: Lift Off, Scene Investigation and Turbo Boost. More on this in another blog post.

For further reading about our weekend see what Mathias wrote.

Well, sort of. We are going to the north sea over the next weekend. Following our heroes at 37signals we will be spending two days at the countryside discussing the future of our little company.

Of the 6 people going everyone will be doing 2 15 minute talks: one about upstream and his/her involvement, one about a random topic of interest. The goal of this trip is to find out what upstream should stand for and do in 2009 (and to take as many pictures as possible, cook and eat lots of yum food and relax at the fireplace).

I’ll blog about the results after the weekend, stay tuned

As the careful reader might have noticed, we have added another RSS feed to the blog sidebar. Under the keiala product blog you can now see our commits to all our open source repositories on github. To make this possible I have used yahoo pipes for the first time. The pipe consumes the RSS feeds of all our open source projects on github, merges these into one, prefixes the titles with the project names and also truncates them, before wordpress consumes that pipe’s output and displays it in a sidebar widget. That’s what I call a real mashup. If anyone is interested, here’s the pipe.

Na endlich. Nach all den Jahren des nur-Geldverdienens und Open Source-Ausnutzens haben wir es geschafft, ein paar erste Zeilen Code in die Freiheit zu entlassen: dead simple reports, ein Rails-Plugin, das Reports generieren kann. Mehr dazu im neuen Bereich Open Source

Endlich ist es so weit – nach nunmehr 3 Monaten Entwicklungszeit geht kommt-mit.de online. KommtMit ist die erste deutsche web 2.0-kompatible Community für Reisen und Ausflüge.

Plant vom nächsten Strandurlaub über die Fahrradtour, die Klassenfahrt, den Traumurlaub irgendwann mal, die Dienstreise, das Gruppenseminar bis hin zur Weltumrundung alle eure Reisen.

Auf KommMit könnt ihr:

• alle Freunde einfach zu euren Reisen einladen
• mit der Aufgabenliste im Voraus klären, wer denn nun den Dosenöffner nicht vergessen darf oder wer für’s Picknick zuständig ist
• auf der Pinnwand den Abfahrtstermin diskutieren
• im Kochbuch Rezepte heraussuchen und euch eine Einkaufsliste zusammenstellen lassen
• ein Reisetagebuch führen: für die zu-Hause-Gebliebenen und die Erinnerung
• Fotos hochladen (und sogar angucken )
• das Reiseziel anhand von Satellitenbildern und Fotos erkunden

.. und noch so einiges mehr. Wir freuen uns über jeden Besucher und auch über Feedback, denn noch ist die Seite im Betatest. Neuigkeiten ab sofort dann immer hier im Blog.

… wir sind upstream aus Berlin und wir entwickeln Anwendungen für das Web ab Version 2.0. An dieser Stelle werden wir über Themen wie Start Ups, unser derzeitiges Lieblingsframework Ruby on Rails, technische Spielzeuge, die digitale Boheme, Mittagessen im Friedrichshain, Programmierkniffe, agile Softwareentwicklung, interessantes und amüsantes aus der Netzwelt sowie natürlich unsere eigenen Aktivitäten bloggen.

Unsere Hauptbeschäftigung liegt derzeit bei autovc.com – man könnte es das StudiVZ für Autofahrer nennen. Im Moment noch public beta – wir freuen uns über jeden Besucher, jedes neue Mitglied und auch Kommentare.

Wir, das sind zur Zeit zwei unternehmergewordene Programmierer, sesshaft in Berlin Friedrichshain: Thilo Utke und Alexander Lang.

Ziel dieses Blogs ist es, neben der Kommunikation unserer Projekte und Produkte, Beiträge zu Fragen und Themen der Netzgemeinschaft zu leisten sowie unser Netzwerk um interessante und fähige Menschen zu erweitern.

Bei Fragen wendet euch per Email an alex[at]upstream-berlin[punkt]com bzw. thilo[at]upstream-berlin[punkt]com oder hinterlasst einen Kommentar.

Alex und Thilo.