When you find something you’re passionate about, you latch onto it and don’t let go. And perhaps Ryan might say we’re embellishing his story a little bit, or giving him more credit than he deserves, but we think he’s pretty awesome at what he does. The fact that he’s been coding and developing since grade 7 is nothing to shake a stick at. Nor is the fact that he’s been developing and selling software products since grade 10. Considering he started developing in 1995 when it wasn’t taught in schools and you had to teach yourself, really kind of says something about his passion (or madness) for developing.
Since then Ryan’s gone on to develop for big companies — AT&T, BlackBerry, FedEx, HP, Cisco, and others (he’d tell us, but then he’d have to kill us, just kidding, we think…). And he speaks at conferences as a thought leader. All in all, we think he’s kind of a big deal.
But how does that story merge into Biznas? Well, as you can see Ryan’s been in the business for a while, so he’s seen a lot of great things come out of the way software development has changed over the years, but he’s also really aware of the challenges that still plague the development process — developing software takes too long, costs too much, and innovation is too unpredictable.
Ryan has spent a lot of time thinking about why these challenges continue to exist. There is a shortage of architects. The ones that are really good at what they do are in extremely high demand and cost a lot to contract (ie, startups can’t hire them). Then there’s time that’s wasted building the core of the app and common features — developers are recreating the proverbial wheel every time, despite the fact that these features persist across multiple applications. When staff changes occur there is rarely a full handover of the product, and no matter how good the documentation, there’s always some architectural knowledge that’s going to be lost. Technology is constantly growing, changing, and improving,. Doing research on what is the best solution for a problem is time consuming. Developers want to learn and improve, but it can be difficult when you’re getting paid to produce results — you don’t have time for both.
All of that is the dirt out of which Biznas has grown from. This desire to create a high level solution. Something that would standardize the technology and process. When Biznas wraps up a project, we take the time to meet, discuss, and analyze the project. How can we improve our lean development process? What tools did we use? What tools can we create to help increase efficiency? What modules can we develop for our platform to decrease the amount of code we need to write next time?
We have a big hairy goal: To be the fastest and most predictable software development company in the world.
To be more than just another dev shop. We’re changing the Biznas of development. You should probably follow our journey.
