Pieoneers ✤ Blog

HOME | SERVICES | WORK | CONTACT Pieoneers Builds Smart Solutions for Web & Mobile   Updates on our mobile & web development, UX, UI and responsive design. Thoughts on web design and a few things we love: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, NodeJS, React, Python, Django, Erlang, iOS, Android, Docker, Kubernetes & more. 

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Pieoneers Featured as a Canadian Leader in Development on Clutch

Pieoneers was awarded a spot as a Clutch Canadian Leader, a list of the most highly reviewed developers and agencies across Canada.

This month, Clutch acknowledged us as a Web and Mobile App Development Leader in Canada in their annual list of the Leading Agencies and Developers in Canada. The annual report includes several hundred Canadian companies across six industries, and each company is evaluated based on client reviews, market presence, and ability to deliver high-quality services.

Clutch is a B2B ratings and review firm based out of Washington, D.C. covering development companies in Canada and around the world. Clutch’s research methodology evaluates companies on numerous quantitative and qualitative factors, with the most important component being verified client reviews.

This year, in Clutch’s Canadian Leaders list, we were featured as a Top Mobile App Development Company in Canada, a Top Android App Development Company in Canada, and a Top Ruby on Rails Development Company in Canada. Clutch’s report evaluated hundreds of Canadian companies, so it is impressive that we were named in the top 15 of firms in each of these categories.

Based in Vancouver, we are proud to serve our clients both in Canada, the US and around the world. With almost ten years of experience in the development space, our talented team of developers and creatives is dedicated to bringing our clients goals to life. We focus on building and creating ideas that challenge the current market, and our team is best equipped to deliver high-class solutions and results to our clients.

With our tenure and experience, it’s no surprise that our Clutch profile is full of positive reviews.

One of our recent five-star reviewers complimented our passion and understanding:

“One of the things that attracted us to Pieoneers was that they seemed to understand the nature of our project. For example, the psychological profile of our user base isn't immediately clear. In many cases, we're interacting with older academics who aren't very comfortable with computers. Pieoneers' team have gone out of their way to design our process and make those people comfortable.”

We’re proud to see our clients leave positive reviews on Clutch, and we look forward to delivering more successful projects in the coming year. We also look forward to keeping up our Clutch presence and to being included in their annual report again next year!

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Pieoneers Ranked As A Top Web Developer in Canada

Pieoneers has been ranked among the top nine web development companies in Canada by an independent research-and-review platform TopAgency.

TopAgency has studied a countless number of web development firms across the globe and has developed a reliable algorithm, based on its studies of these firms and the prospective clients. Based on this algorithm, the analysts of the platform assess the companies for selected services and certain locations. The most recent assessment conducted by the company was on the web development firms in Canada. As per the report, these companies were first assessed for qualifying parameters that ascertained the trustworthiness of a company.

Another major parameter, as was mentioned in the research report, for this first round of assessment includes the study of company’s market position. The analysts have ensured that all the chosen companies, which were to be assessed on the basis of their services and other essential parameters, have a sound legal and financial stand in the market. Other than that, client ratings too were considered as significant factors in this initial stage of assessment.

Pieoneers did not only qualify this round but also earned high ratings in other stages of the analysis. After conducting a careful study of client reviews and the web products developed by us, the platform has given us high ratings on technical expertise and client orientation criteria as well.

While conducting the assessment based on these grounds, the analysts have also picked some of the essential features of our services that set us apart from other companies. These specific points were considered crucial for the final ranking and were also mentioned in the profile description of the chosen companies.

For Pieoneers, this description includes a brief introduction of our comprehensive services and a mention of how we became a full-service digital agency, having started as a software and application development service provider. Following this, the editors have written about the multitude of industries that we have served, attributing our technical skills and knowledge of business logic to the ‘amazing’ user experience that they have observed in all the projects they have assessed. In fact, the editors have even complimented our team for their profound knowledge of market and user expectations. They have attributed these two as the special features of our services, which result in the development of ‘impressive’ web products.

In the end of this description, the editors have briefed some of the client reviews, which they collected during the research period. And it goes like this-

“The company has also earned several appreciative remarks from its clients who complement its team for their professionalism, collaboration, efficiency, clarity of thoughts, technical expertise, flexible work approach, and the commendable customer support system.”

It is quite evident that these positive reviews from our clients are one of the chief reasons for why we were included in the ranking. Truly, all our technical skills and detailed work approach would have failed to earn us the spot among our talented peers, if it was not for the benign acknowledgment of our clients, and for this we thank them wholeheartedly. In return, we promise them that we will deepen our study on the market so that we can keep them ahead of the competition and trends. We'd also like to thank the TopAgency team for this recognition and congratulate all the other companies that share this moment of glory with us.

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Pieoneers Receives an All-Star Rating: App Development Firms

We have been rated among the top web and app development firms by ratings and review firm, Clutch.

Clutch’s primary determinants of a successful ranking are previous work, client base, and proven ability to deliver on clients’ expectations. Some of our clients were recently interviewed, extolling their working relationship with us.

A brief overview pulled from Clutch interview with our client, Progressa, is below:

Project summary: The client is a financial technology firm based in Vancouver, Canada. Limited technical capabilities and increasing demand convinced the client to find a partner capable of supporting the development of their custom web application. Pieoneers was considered carefully and then contracted to supply a dedicated team consisting of a project manager and several developers.> Feedback summary: The client remains very impressed with Pieoneers and their overall performance. According to the client, Pieoneers has proven instrumental in the ongoing improvement of their web solution and its long-term scaling. It was noted that Pieoneers brings exceptional creativity and project management skills to the table. The client highly recommends Pieoneers to others.

We received perfect marks from this client, but even better than the rating is hearing clients’ share their appreciation for our work.

You can check out all of Pieoneers Reviews by following the link or to learn more about how we were evaluated, take a look at Clutch. Clutch is located in Washington, DC and speaks with people all over the world about their experiences working with various types of development and design firms.

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The new version of the BoyFriendLog app has been released for sale today! Congrats! @TheBoyfriendLog

Find out more about the app http://theboyfriendlog.com/

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We wanted to share a good quote for today inspired by a team conversation about getting things done perfectly and on time. Below is an approximate translation of a thought by one of the top word designers Artemy Lebedev, put into English words by us, so feel free to improve on this and let us know :)

If you restrict your time for the task and do your best, then this is the best you can do. If you don't restrict time, you'll spend all the time you have and still not be satisfied.

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Pieoneers has been featured as one of top web developers in Canada in 2015. 

https://clutch.co/ca/web-developers 

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Welcome the all new Progressa.com now powered by a mobile first digital experience. Easily learn about the benefits and the available service options from any mobile iOS or Android device. 

Find answers and get support by joining the community of people who have experience and are happy to share.

The new Progressa digital expereince relies on Rails, mobile-first user experience, the all new branding boosted with vector-based SVG illustrations, Require.js, animations implemented with scrollReveal.js.

Yours,

The Pie team

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Poptop - a new successful startup launching as part of the Ignite Program (ignite.io) in the UK closed a round of $30,000 in Jan 2015.

Please, meet Poptop (http://www.poptop.uk.com) – an international marketplace where planners of private events can book artists and entertainment professionals for their events without intermediaries. It is a seamless solution for planning your event and finding the best fitting vendor for a fair price. The service currently works in the UK, Ukraine, and Poland. The catalogue includes 9000+ suppliers and 800+ booking requests per month. - Evgeniy Shestopal, Co-founder at Poptop

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Tech. Women. Leaders.

A new site we just launched www.techwomenlead.com was the result of a grassroots effort in the tech community led by two women tech entrepreneurs - myself and Christine Pilkington. We each have young kids, a thriving business with big ambition and a passion for tech. We decided to initiate this after seeing one too many articles telling just one side of the story, and quickly got the support needed to make this happen.

There are hundreds of amazing tech companies founded and led by women in each part of the world, and yet most people even in the tech sector don’t know that. We need to make this more visible, more top of mind, if we want to see more girls embracing careers in STEM.

The subconscious influence of images and beliefs is incredible - do you remember the old riddle: "A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon (doctor) says 'I can not do the surgery because this is my son'. How is this possible?" It still stumps people, as it's still hard to think of surgeons as the mother.

The Tech Women Lead site reveals the portraits of over 30 women BC tech leaders to help tell the other end of the story: tech is for girls and women too. This project is meant to help people when they hear "tech CEO" conjure mental images of women too, using images of the many women who are actually in the tech C-suite: founders, CEO, COO or CFO of a tech business.

Olena Tkhorovska, co-founder @pieoneers, @flowmail.

So what did we do? We secured the support of Science World who hosted the photoshoot, Verlico (a BC fashion blogging startup) supplied photographers,Sephora helped with a make up artist and then had some sponsors (the BC Innovation Council (BCIC), the BC Technology Association (BCTIA) and the Founders Collective) who helped host a wine and cheese reception, so the women tech leaders could network around getting the photos done. With one week's notice, from a list of 80 tech women leaders, over 50 came!

Featuring local super-entrepreneurs such as Judi Hess who sold Creo to Kodak in 2005 for $1b and is now head of Copperleaf Technologies to up and coming tech leaders like Janice Cheam from Energy Aware and Alice Park from Go2Gether, this shows that the future of tech is also female and diverse.

Tech women leaders who mentor and fund are also featured - from connectors like Shirley Vickers who is Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at BCIC to finance savvy women who run investment funds like Thealzel Lee (E-Fund) and Bonnie Foley-Wong (Pique Ventures).

This new initiative will be unveiled tonight at the event hosted by the BCTIA (BC Technology Industry Association) in partnership with ACETECH, Futurpreneur, andWomen in Communications & Technology (WCT). It's a reception celebratingWomen’s Entrepreneurship Day (WED) in Vancouver as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Let us now if you want to do the same in your city - easy to put together, great fun and clearly great impact.

Alexandra T. Greenhill is the CEO cofounder of myBestHelper, a tech platform for busy families needing help at home. This Tech Women Lead was a passion project that just happened. It would have never worked without the help of a village - so many came together to make this work. I am grateful.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141119230627-9612453-tech-is-for-girls-and-women-too

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Creating the next big thing? Don't overdo it

Your team could be any size, there is always someone craving for intensive development. Polishing pixels and covering aerial forthcoming performance issues might seem to be a sign of solid expertise. It is perhaps comfortable to hypothesize during the internal meetings, however, the initial idea will certainly need to be modified when the real-world challenges arise.

Don't fall into the trap

It is easy to fall into the trap. Follow all possible design trends and development practices. Every aspect of your über-product must be done just right. One day you'll find the CSS structured as a few dozen files and a primitive API thoroughly profiled and BDD-tested in all seriousness. Be proud of the amount of green dots your test suite prints out. The green code climate badge can tell exactly that you are on the right track.

Solve customer problems

No need to point, software is intended to solve problems. No matter what market niche or which business goals you pursue, your application is brilliant as long as it's functional and fulfils customer needs. There is an easy way to deliver applications. I would rapidly sketch in a single file using tools already known and available rather than scatter resources on countless development cycles.

How about open source?

Why do contributors care so much about keeping their code organized? - you ask. The answer is fairly predictable: the measure of how quickly a github user can grasp the project and put their two cents comes to the foreground. Selecting libraries, you walk away from ones which were contributed to a while ago. In other words, code quality and readability are mandatory attributes of a successful open source project.

Focus on traction

If you goal is NOT to sell solely the code, but create a product people will use and pay for, it feels much more valuable for your business to iterate quickly and sharpen the idea with minimal friction. And ensure maximum traction.

by Andrew Manshin, CTO at Pieoneers

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Famo.us a JavaScript framework is speeding up its development, and the raised $25M helps boost the process.

Why Famo.us is famous. Famo.us is a JavaSript-based framework that lets app and site developers create beautiful 3D imagery and gaming-like visuals inside the browser. It has a 'physics' animation engine that applies rules of the natural world to web content, which in turn resonates with the 'material design' approach promoted by Google.

It's goal is to become the platform for the next generation of websites and apps, and to close the gap in performance between native apps and browser apps. The gap still exists due to known insufficient performance of HTML5. Now that in the past two or three JavaScript has gotten fast enough and is now about 80 percent as fast as compiled C code, this has become possible. The new framework will allow developers to create applications that will perform just as well on mobile devices as the native apps, and provide universal solutions that will work on iPhones and Android smartphones, as well as any device with a modern browser.

Built by two founders - Steve Newcomb and Mark Lu. Now also built by 25 employees and 40+ more to come.

Famo.us plans to rebuild 10 top widgets in the jQuery library (some commonly used JavaScript objects like image carousels and lightboxes, and rebuild objects in Twitter Bootstrap (a mobile-first front-end development platform).

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WIRED Space Photo of the Day | Earth From Apollo 11 NASA #earth #moon #space #ourbluedot

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Why switch from PNG to SVG and improve your online branding.

Work in progress on switching most PNG assets to SVG versions for http://pieoneers.com to ensure images look crisp no matter what zoom you're at. Stay tuned to for our launch announcement! :)

Browsing websites on retina screens (iPhone, iPad, Mac) is really nice, the fonts are crisp, some websites serve alternative image versions. However, 99% of websites still lack support for retina screens - the images or the logos would look hazy and detract from the overall user experience.

This is especially relevant for touch-screens. When viewing content on an iPhone, iPad, people tend to zoom in to view something. What happens to a regular PNG or JPG image when it's zoomed, it loses its quality and crispness.

While this may not be critical for large high-quality photos, it's critical for logotypes and icons - the main focus elements on any company website page. These elements are the stepping stones that provide a path for the online user to understanding your brand.

Replacing important branding elements with vector graphics will provide two benefits: 

the pages will likely weigh less and will load faster, especially if you are replacing regular and retina versions with just one vector file

the branding elements will always look sharp and crisp preserving every bit of goodness the designer initially created

Source: pieoneers.com.

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Woot! Work in progress on #mobile #responsive design for online biking magazine with amazing photographs and reviews. Coming soon!

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Are you prepared for the new anti-spam law?

On July 1, 2014 CASL will require a few serious changes to your commercial email process:

businesses must obtain express consent to send newsletters and email of commercial nature

prompt users to check the box or switch the toggle themselves, pre-checked consent boxes are no longer allowed

include business address and contact information

provide an obvious unsubscribe mechanism

Review details.

[pieoneers]

Happy birthday Canada! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t41wNkGvJ9k

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New RFG logo already alive on hats and tshirts. Photos courtesy ridingfeels.com. Website in progress, coming soon!