our posts tagged “culture”

Meet Jeremy Tarver, player of Native American stickball, river enthusiast, and underappreciated treehouse architect.

Name, Company, Title, City

Jeremy Tarver, Infinity Interactive, Senior Developer, Athens GA

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Meet Suzanne Raphael, Infinity’s QA evangelist. A thinker, consultant, thinker, camper, thinker…. okay perhaps a bit of an overthinker, but the perfect kind of overthinker for QA and Infinity.

Name, Company, Title, City

Suzanne Raphael, Infinity Interactive, Lead QA/Consultant, Ossining, NY

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Meet Matt Holtz, our Denver developer, dog lover, new dad, and the latest in our Infinity interview series.

Name, Company, Title, City

Matt Holtz, Infinity Interactive, Lead Consultant, Denver CO

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Meet Matt Patterson (mattpatt), an Infinity developer, and an improviser in music and thought. A man who loves jazz, a good burger, and Larry David!

Name, Company, Title, City

Matt Patterson, Infinity Interactive, Junior Developer, Central Virginia

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Meet Trey Bianchini, Infinity developer who, in his spare time likes to make really good espresso and also, electric guitars.

Name, Company, Title, City

Trey Bianchini, Infinity Interactive, Programmer, Omaha, NE

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In this latest post in our interview series, we’d like to introduce you to our own John Bowser, programmer, nature lover, cat guy.

Name, Company, Title, City

John Bowser, Infinity Interactive, Junior Developer, Salt Lake City, UT

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Here at Infinity, one of our core precepts — coined by former Infin-ite Shawn Moore — is the notion that “tickets are free”. The idea is that you should never waste time wondering “should I make a ticket for this?” Instead, just make the damn ticket! In the immortal words of John Blutarsky, “it don’t cost nuthin’.”

With an opening paragraph like that, you’re probably expecting some sort of listicle of all the ways adopting our “tickets are free” credo will help make your software development efforts better and turbocharge your coders to new heights of productivity. That is not what you’re gonna get, however. Nope! Instead, I’m going to talk to you about how tickets are free… because they’re not free like beer, but instead are free like puppies. And then I’ll share ways to make sure your freely created tickets are usefully propelling your project forward, instead of bogging it down.

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At Infinity, we’ve been a fully remote, on-shore tech consultancy and custom software development company since 2005 (founded in 1998), so a lot of our friends and contacts have been asking us for advice on effectively managing remote co-working. We thought it would be helpful to share some of our tips and tricks from both the leadership and employee perspectives.

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About seven months ago, I started practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a grappling art founded in Brazil. Immediately after, I began comparing everything to it. My kids started making fun of me: “Everything is Jiu-Jitsu for you, Dada.” And, they were right. If I was reading, I’d say, “I’m grappling with the book.” If I was cooking, I’d say, “I’m Jiu-Jitsuing food.” If my five-year-old daughter asked me to help her cut her food during dinner, I’d say, “Just Jiu-Jitsu it. Pin it down with your fork so it won’t move. Then, cut it.”

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Yesterday marked our 20th anniversary.

It’s been an awesome ride and we’re grateful for the opportunity to have enjoyed every moment with so many wonderful partners, clients, and colleagues. This weekend, I had an opportunity to spend a few minutes to sit back and reflect on the experiences of the past twenty years as well as the path forward to the next twenty.

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This summer I had the wonderful opportunity to represent Infinity and speak at a number of conferences. Earlier in the year I was doing a much better job of keeping up with writing up my experiences at each conference soon after it happened, but as things got busy over the summer, I got behind. Below the fold, I’ll do a brief recap of each of the five (yes, five!) conferences I’ve spoken at and not yet recapped here.

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In this latest post in our interview series, we’d like to introduce you to our own Eric Wagoner, the magnificent man of many talents. He is one of our senior developers.

Name, Company, Title, City

Eric Wagoner, Infinity Interactive, Senior Developer, Athens Georgia

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This past weekend I visited Grand Rapids, Michigan for the first ever Beer City Code on the campus of Calvin College. I took a class on how to write .NET applications on a Mac, saw some great talks, presented a talk on JSON Web Tokens, and more. My full wrap up is below the fold.

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The first weekend in May, I had a chance to attend LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, WA. I also got to present a couple talks. I had a great time --- read on for all the details!

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I recently had the opportunity to attend and speak at SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, and it was an awesome experience. Read on for an overview of all the great talks I got a chance to see!

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Welcome to the latest blog post in our interview series. We’d like to introduce you to our programmer, Toby Deshane.

Name, Company, Title, City

I’m Toby Deshane and I work for Infinity Interactive as a Programmer. I live in Middletown, CT.

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Welcome to the latest blog post in our interview series. We’d like to introduce you to our resident Californian and front-end programmer extraordinaire, Will Hutchinson (aka Hutch).

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Some of the folks here at Infinity Interactive are avid players of fantasy sports, and this year, they convinced me to join their Fantasy Football league. Two months into the season, what started as a casual game has turned into a trip through a data analytics wonderland as well as what will hopefully be a recurring series of posts here looking at various aspects of the data analysis that I've been doing.

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Welcome to the 10th blog post in our interview series. Let’s pause to mark this occasion and fire up the confetti cannon. We hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know our crew. And, while those colorful tiny pieces of paper fill the backdrop, let me introduce you to our own Tracey Shirley.

Meet Tracey. She is compassionate, kind, clear, logical, efficient, and analytic. She keeps projects on track and uncovers software bugs in a way that leaves us all inspired. I know I want to be like her. Read her answers to my questions.

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YAPC::EU is Europe's premier event for the Perl programming language. This year the conference was held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, from August 24 through August 28. Infinity sent one of our developers, Sweth Chandramouli, to attend, and we asked him to give a quick recap of his experiences there.

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OpenWest is “the largest regional tech conference devoted to all things OPEN: Hardware, Standards, Source & Data”. This year the conference was held in Sandy, UT from July 13th to July 16th.

Infinity sent a large contingent of folks to Sandy for the conference, and a number of them have summarized their experiences in this blog post.

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In this blog post in our interview series, we would like to introduce you to our own Jay Hannah.

Meet Jay. He is a traveling man, currently somewhere in North America --- we think. He is a programmer and team lead at Infinity.

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In the latest post in our interview series, we’re pleased to introduce you to Tommy Lee.

Meet Tommy. He is half of the founding duo of Infinity, a NY Yankees season ticket holder and a sleep-deprived parent of three precocious young girls.

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Welcome to the first in our series of interviews with people in the Infinity community. Approximately monthly, we’ll introduce you to a member of the Infinity team, an Infinity partner, or general person of interest. Our first interview is with our own Yanick Champoux.

Meet Yanick. A damn fine man. A programmer extraordinaire. A comic book writer. He is a native of Montréal currently living in Ottawa, Canada. The man contains multitudes.

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I originally bought my iPad back when tablets were becoming a fad. I had expected to use it for everything from reading ebooks to playing elaborate new games. But no, it has been sitting idle, collecting dust, for years. Even the promise of a shared, coffee-table web browser has fallen flat. Whenever there's a task to be done, I instead reach for my laptop or my phone. After all, as phones get larger and more capable, and laptops get lighter and extend their battery life, the sweet spot that tablets offer gets squeezed out from both above and below. So for the past year or so, my usage has been limited to ordering food online with friends, passing the iPad down the couch. But now I've finally figured out the perfect job for it. I've mounted it right next to my front door. My previously-unused iPad now serves as a dashboard and control panel for my apartment.

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I remember smiling to myself when my granddaughter asked me to “pause” while reading her a bedtime story. To her, the language was appropriate. She has only known a world where you have the power to “pause” by simply pushing a button.

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Are you trying to bring modern development practices to a …less-than-modern software development environment?

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Editor's Note: The picture below, and this article in general, may seem like unusual content to find on the blog of a technical company like Infinity Interactive, but one of our goals here is to give you a full picture of Infinity and our employees, and we think this article by Paul Zolnierczyk, a member of our .NET/Java team, has some important things to say.

Before I joined Infinity Interactive, I worked in typical IT work environments. I can go on about how much better the water cooler talk is over in our '#General' IRC channel but that can be saved for another post. What I'd like to talk about is how working at Infinity Interactive allows me to live my life and truly achieve a healthy work/life balance.

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I abhor when people treat us like “Vendors” instead of Partners.

You might think that it’s merely semantics, but I would say that the words that we use to define our relationship actually help define the quality of our interactions and the philosophy and attitude of how we work together. Look at the etymology… Vendor comes from the Latin "vendere," to sell, whereas partner comes from the French "parçonier," joint owner. The former smacks of "me getting mine", while the latter is about our mutual success.

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Editor's note: Infinity's Notebook isn't just about our technical prowess. We also showcase some of the amazing things our team members do away from the keyboard. This week, one of our .NET developers, Alex Sparkman, writes about scuba diving in Las Vegas immediately after our company summit.

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I joined Infinity a little over two years ago. Came from a much more traditional corporate culture. A culture contained in traditional brick-and-mortar buildings. You could stop by a coworker’s cube and bump into folks in the lunchroom. Infinity has no brick-and-mortar home. We’re a distributed workforce with our ~25 people spread out all across the US. Each of us works from our home. Our water cooler is an IRC channel called #general.

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Any industry that relies on "communication" is at risk of failure, or partial failure, due to mitigated speech versus direct speech. That failure can be as simple as a missed deadline, or as catastrophic as a complete failure of the project.

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