Code71 celebrates 2-year anniversary

We (Syed and Nimat) were in Dhaka from May 1st till June 5th. It was a busy month for us as well as the rest of the team, so the weeks passed like a moment.


We celebrated our 2-year anniversary on May 18th. It's hard to believe 2 years have passed since we started. I am sure some of us still rememeber the small informal place where we started our operation in May 2006. It is a major milestone for any startup. From a humble begining with a 3-member team, we are now a 17-member team. Check our site for our latest team profile. A few of our achievements over the last 2 years that we are proud to share with you,

1. We have become experts using Ruby on Rails and Amazon's cloud computing.
2. We have become experts in using Scrum for remote delivery. We are presenting a paper on this topic at Agile Alliance conference in August 2008.
3. We have built a Web-based project management tool- ScrumPad. We and our clients are using it everyday. We are getting ready for the Beta release soon.
4. Our client list is growing.
   

We still have a long way to go and a lot to achieve. We are looking forward to the coming years to handle new challenges, growth and partnership. We could not come this far or cannot go further without our team's support. But behind our team's success we feel that our family and friends played a vital role. So, we decided to show our appreciation to our family and friends by including them in our 2-year celebration party at Jamuna Resort. It was a great day with family and friends. The team played basketball, soccer, and then chill out in the pool. Sohan brought sweets from his hometown Tangail. The sweets were very yummy and I don't know about others, but I had 3 of those. Later in the afternoon, we went for a boat ride on the river. The scorching May heat bothered us a little, but we were a hotter team...here are some photos from our trip.

During our visit we met with Munir Bhai from Bangladesh Open Source Network. When Munir bhai propsed that we should conduct a Ruby on Rails workshop in Bangladesh, we jumped at the idea. BDOSN organized and advertised the event, Code71 conducted the workshop, and IICT, BUET hosted the workshop. So right after we got back from our Jamuna Resort trip, we got busy with planning and developing the 4 day course. Fuad, Zahid, Ratul, Faruk, Rubaiat, Sami and Sohan taught the class. They did an excellent job. The three-way partnership- BDOSN, IICT, and Code71 was a scuccess. We have also established a Ruby on Rails Google group to provide support to RoR community in Bangladesh. Our group name is code71_on_rubyonrails. Join the group today and let's promote RoR adoption in Bangladesh and learn as community.

Instructors, Students and Organizers from the RoR Workshop

I am going to end our this month's blog with some issues that we have been pondering about at Code71. We are interested in what others are thinking about these issues. Lately we have been reading or hearing about Bangladesh's potential as an IT outsourcing destination. However, it seems we are still struggling to figure out how to unleash that potential. We will leave you with where our thoughts are,

1. How do we address the infrastructure (e.g., power, reliable and affordable Internet bandwidth) issues?


2. How do we attract enough students to study computer science to support the potential growth?
3. How do we put in place a sustainable training & education programs that will produce enough progranmers


4. How do we market Bangladesh as an outsourcing alternative and get our customers interested?
   
   
   Are you also trying to find the answers to these questions? Let's talk.