Everybody likes to do a bit of reflection by the turn of the year, so I’ll take the risk of posting yet another non-technical article to this weblog. Since I graduated from Copenhagen Business School 2,5 years ago I’ve been living out the dream of working full time with Ruby on Rails as a freelance developer. I been lucky enough to work with several entrepreneurs and be part of some very exiting projects from their very beginnings. I’ve learned that I’m quite good at getting a project from nothing to something, but that the real challenge is get it from something to Something Great. I’ve also learned that I enjoy development more when I have other developers to work with, and that a team effort yields better results of a higher quality than when I hack on something all by myself. What a surprise.

Bearing that in mind it might seem an obvious choice now, but I wasn’t at all considering becoming a full time employee when the opportunity of Podio showed itself little more than a month ago. I was not headhunted by Podio, although I would have liked to say that I was. Rather I was asked by them if I knew any Ruby developers that might be interested in applying for a position and that peaked my curiosity. Podio went out of stealth mode in the summer of 2010 and generated a fair amount of hype boasting both high ambitions and leading employees with a proven track record. But technically it was quite uninteresting to us Ruby-worshippers, as it was written in PHP using the Drupal platform. So why was Podio suddenly seeking Ruby-developers?

Podio is a social work platform that allows users to build their own data structures, workflows and reports. Some call it Facebook for companies, other call it yet another project management tool. You can use it for both of those purposes if you like – but you can also use it in a complete different way. This is how Podio really differentiates itself from competitors such as Basecamp and Highrise, which are great tools for project management and CRM but works only like 37signals thinks they should – take it or leave it. In truth I am still struggling with explaining Podio, but if you try it you will see what I mean.

It turned out that Podio had decided to ditch PHP and Drupal and had already rewritten the entire backend to Python. The next step was to rewrite the entire frontend to Ruby on Rails and that challenge was too exiting for me to resist. So I can now count myself amongst the lucky few in Podio’s development team and employee no. 15 in the company. I look forward to learn a lot from new colleges, put a lot of hard work into the product and help make Podio realize its full potential as a platform built in Ruby/Python right here in Copenhagen.

Happy New Year!