Gist.

2010 was a great year at Gist and we thought it would be cool to take a look back at our performance from a year of Agile Development. It is amazing to see how much a team can accomplish when everyone works together to make it happen. For all you numbers geeks out there, here are some interesting stats and observations from the past year:

1. Shipped 25 releases. (Almost a release every 2 WEEKS!)
2. Ten iPhone releases.
3. Three Android releases.
4. Fourteen Gist for Outlook releases.
5. On top of all that, we also launched new apps for Google Apps, Lotus Notes, Firefox and Chrome.

When Work Gets Done

One really interesting thing we found was our “Work from home” day (Thursday) had more commits than any other day between the hours of 6 p.m. and midnight. I guess it shows that people actually can work from home but they just do it on their own time and make sure it gets done by Friday. Another observation was that the only time throughout the entire year that nothing was committed was Saturday at 6 a.m. (Check out the white space on the chart below)

Also, the most active hour of the day over the entire year was 5 p.m. which proves the “Parkinsons Law Theory.”

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Don’t Forget About Coffee

We have a pretty amazing coffee machine in the Gist office and it has made over 7998 cups of coffee since we purchased the new machine. (Totally makes our pricey “Jura Impressa F7 Automatic Coffee Center” worth it!)

Thank You and Here’s to 2011

We don’t plan on slowing down and will keep the pace moving even faster in 2011 (Scrum of Scrum anyone?) Thanks to all of you who have been with us along the way and if you are a developer who likes coffee and want to be a part of this post next year, check out our job openings here.

How does your team do development? We’d love to talk more in the comments!

The Gist team works together

Team Effort Makes the Plan a Reality

The Gist team recently took a day off from coding, talking to customers, and doing the business of a company to do something physical and tangible: climb a mountain.  Fueled by donuts, energy bars, and sandwiches, we made it to the top of Mt. Si in North Bend, WA, a 2700′ rise and 8 mile round-trip hike, and completed the task as a team. We started our task at 10am, made the top of the mountain around 2pm, and returned triumphant to the bottom of the mountain at 4:30pm.  Our journey embodies the process of building a company, one step at a time.

Not all of the paths are charted.

When you build a company, you don’t know all of the paths that you might take.  On our mountain climb, we didn’t know exactly how long it would take, didn’t know initially where we might stop along the way to rest, and didn’t know where our pace might not match with our ability.  But we knew our goal: to get to the top of the mountain with the whole team.   We were able to mesh our styles — some of us are world-class climbers, while others are merely world-class coders and testers — and work together as a team to reach the top.  We all felt a little bit uncomfortable: fast people had to go slower than they wanted, and the slow people had to go faster than they wanted (and Ally the Black Lab probably covered more ground than anyone.)

All the decisions won’t be perfect.

We didn’t know exactly how we would feel getting from the bottom of the mountain, reaching the top, and coming back down again.  But we knew the path — at least some of the trail was well-worn — and other aspects needed continuous improvement.  Did we have enough water and supplies?  Did we need to stop at some points where others wanted to go on?  We made the best decisions we were capable of at the time, and then corrected when we hit a wrong path.  When we made a decision, we sometimes relied upon the actions of a few leaders, and made other decisions as a group.

The important thing is to get back on the right path quickly.

At Gist, we go through this task every two weeks.  Using an Agile development process, we plan our next set of work, agree on how much work it will be, work together to produce a new feature or version of the product, and release it.  It’s not always a seamless task: sometimes the mountain is more forbidding and treacherous and we have to go back up the mountain when we think we’re done to rescue a member of the team, and other times the sun is shining and we all finish in record time.  We are a team and we climb our mountains together — we hope our product reflects this shared commitment.

It’s hard to keep track of what everyone in your network is doing. That’s why we created Gist. Gist helps you build professional relationships by serving you the right information at the right moment to get a meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. We would love you to try out Gist here.

To view a 90 second video of exactly what Gist does, click here.

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This post was written by Greg Meyer, Customer Experience Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at greg@gist.com.

At Gist, we believe that part of the business of being an agile startup is to make use of other great tools out there that help us to be more productive from anywhere.

One of these tools is Evernote — a service that helps you to save ideas, things you see, and things you like — which we use at Gist on our mobile devices and to save notes on “the next big thing” or just “the next big thing today.”

If you’d like to use Evernote to save things you read in Gist, it’s easy!

How to Get Started

1. Open an Evernote account — you can do this at the Evernote web site.
2. If you have an existing Evernote account, find the “Emailing to Evernote” information at the Evernote Account Page; this will be an email address that looks like “[username].7c349 @ m.evernote.com.”
3. Add a contact to Gist for this account — you could name it “Send to Evernote” or just “Evernote” — or send a message to Evernote from a Gist-connected email account or contact source (such as Gmail, Google Contacts, Outlook, or an IMAP-enabled email)
4. Now, you can share content from your Gist network with Evernote — simply pick the email sharing option, and type in “Send To Evernote” or “Evernote”
5. Your shared content will show up in your Evernote notebook.

If you’d like to tell us about your favorite tool or service that saves you time and improves productivity, let us know at feedback@gist.com.