It’s been over a week since we got back from London and I am starting to get to sleep at a decent hour again. Three of us; Robby, Andy, and myself were invited to London for a week to visit one of our larger clients in London and Bromley, which is a suburb of London. We stayed at the Thistle Marble Arch just off of Oxford Street well know for its shopping. Oxford Street is a broad bustling street packed with shoppers night and day, one morning I even woke up to hordes of people queuing up to get into Primark from my window. Which then meant I had to go shop at to see what all the fuss was about.

We spent a lot of time on the London Underground

We had three full days of client meetings and three full days to ourselves to run around and sight-see. The weather was spectacular, sunny almost every day.

The business part of the trip was very informative. We met with our client in Bromley, visited their operations office and their print distribution office, commandeered a small room and rearranged the furniture, talked for three days straight about improvements on the administrative and public interfaces of the application, and met over ten new people from the company. It was great to finally meet some of the people that we’ve been working with for the past nine months and elicit Interaction feedback from our client so that we can continue to design and develop a solution that compliments their workflow and future marketing campaigns.

Andy Delcambe commuting on the train from London to Bromley

We also did a fair amount “getting to know you” type socializing. Something we were all happy to do since we had been working together for half a year with few if not all of us having ever met in person.

We also visited one of their vendors, who are responsible for the development of a 8+ year .NET project that we’ve been interfacing with via Ruby on Rails. Andy has been having weekly conference calls with developers there and he got to have a few pints and work side-by-side on some lingering tickets. Their offices were directly across the street from Buckingham Palace, which meant that we got to walk around and see where the Queen lives.

Walking past Buckingham Palace

Once we finished working for the week we had a few days to be tourists. The touristy part of the trip was mellow and, well touristy. We did a lot of walking, visiting various neighborhoods. Since our client is in the travel industry, they were kind enough to supply us with some free tickets for a guided bus and river tour. We went all around London on the river Thames and saw many sights. We saw Big Ben, Parliament, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, and the London Eye. I could never have seen so much by foot. We went to the British Museum, The British History Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The Tate, Buckingham Palace and many more places. We drank flat, “bitter” beer at pubs with names like “Three Tuns” that had carpets, dark wood paneling and “jacket potatoes.” We took the tube with our “oyster cards” everywhere and our fearless transportation leader Andy kept us headed in the right direction at all times.
Our trip was heavily documented by Andy and Robby who have graciously posted torrential amounts of photos Andy Delcambre’s photos and Robby Russell’s photos.

Oh yeah! And it was great meeting those of you who came out to join us for drinks on our nights off!

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Last night, while working late in the office, Andy noticed that Google now had Street View for Portland, Oregon.

Here is our current office location (for the next three weeks).

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In a few weeks, we’ll no longer be facing this side of the block as we’re moving around the corner.

Uploaded with Skitch!

…and a closer view of the exterior of our new studio.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Thank you, Google, for putting Portland (streets) on the map!

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We moved to downtown Portland, Oregon in February of 2006 and while the space has had it’s perks, it also lacked a lot of natural light. So, we had decided that our next location would have much more natural light.

The new office space lacks private offices, but over time we have all migrated to a shared workspace anyway.

It’s just our luck that within the same building, a new studio space opened up. We have people working this month on improvements to the space, such as a finished (wood) floor, installing a sink/kitchen area, amongst other fun stuff. We’re hoping to be in our new space, which is just down the hall around November 1st.

The team is excited that we’ll be in a space that has way more natural light than our current space. :-)

Small perk… Ground Kontrol is across the street!

Stay tuned for more photos as the construction team makes progress…

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It’s October and we’re excited to announce that we’re an official sponsor for the Working with Rails monthly hackfest this month. We’ve allocated one Boxcar for the first prize winner of this months hackfest. As of today, you have 29 days to climb your way to the top of the pack.

Good luck to all those who participate this month!

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