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I have just returned from a full week of work, socializing and excitement in San Francisco with my colleagues from Podio, leading up to official launch of Podio: The product is now open for everyone to try out, and a physical store is open in San Francisco where people can walk right in and get started with Podio. I don’t think anyone ever done something quite like to launch a software product, and it has generated a fair amount of PR with articles in TechCrunch, FastCompany, Inc. Magazine and Mashable just to mention a few.

I joined the Podio team just three months ago, and leading up to this launch we have been working our asses off to provide a top-quality product to make a serious impact on the U.S. market and the rest of the world. The culmination of all this hard work was this launch week in San Francisco and of course the launch party Thursday which more than 300 people showed up for. There is plenty of photos from the week on the Podio account on Flickr.

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?

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Each year around Christmas and New Years I like to find the time to combine my interests in music and video into some sort of of greeting. This year it seems my interest in Apple’s products has also played a key part ;)

I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.