RailsConf 2014 - Get More Hands on Your Keyboard by Manik Juneja

MANIK JUNEJA: So, let's get started. Hi.

My name is Manik, and I'm the founder of Vinsol,

which is a Rails development firm based out

of Delhi, India. And we also do iOS and

Android consultancy. It's a thirteen-year-old
firm,

and we have around sixty-plus developers now.

So, I was going to ask this question so

that I could set some context of the talk,

but since I already I think know all of

you, I'll skip these three slides which I
have.

So I was gonna ask if there are solopreneurs

or freelance programmers here, or if people
belong to

companies with two to five developers, or,
are there

product people here. So I would have kind
of

changed the direction of my talk accordingly.

OK. So, in my talk, like, it's basically in

three parts. In the first part, I'm going
to

quickly tell about myself, so, about my background.
Then

I'll be talking about Vinsol, its history,
the philosophy

behind its existence, the growth part we have
and

why it exists. So those two things would kind

of set the context for the third part, just

like, why, why, why it matters to you, what

value can we provide you?

So, I am an electrical engineer. I learned
Basic,

Pascal and C at school. I never realized I

was professionally going to be programming
at that point

of time, but I enjoyed working on those languages.

The instant gratification that it brings you,
like, you

type something, even if it's like print A
plus

B and you get to see it on the

screen, that's kind of intellectually satisfying
at some level.

So, then after my electrical engineering,
I got placed

in campus. That's the term we use for, like,

college placement in India. And I got selected
in

a huge Indian outsourcing firm with maybe
fifteen thousand

developers. I was chosen to work on a Y2K

project, which was like the year 2000 problem,
where

you're going to, and there's millions of lines
of

Cobal code. You go to where year is represented

as YY and you replace it by YYYY, and

you're done.

So that, that was so intellectually stimulating
and satisfying.

So I quit that job and I started learning

Java. James Cosling had just released Java,
maybe six

months before that time. So, I picked up Java,

changed, switched jobs, joined another huge
Indian outsourcing firm,

and I was, I landed in Tokyo working for

a internet startup there which was in the
internet

e-commerce space.

So. There, I met this guy who was, like,

the senior Japanese developer. A really very
good developer.

Whatever I learned during my career, like,
those initial

years of my career, I learned from him. Like,

he's kind of my guru. But, like, the two

of us was, were working on this team in

Tokyo. We had a six person team back in

India. But what we found was that the two

of us were producing much more. We were much

more productive and the quality of our output
was

much higher than what we were getting from
our

off-shore development team.

So that, that set me thinking, in fact, I

vividly remember what happened when we had
our first

code drop from the Indian team. I was working

on my machine, and I see this guy who

I just call my guru. He was like, Batano-san

was sitting like this, and I, I was like,

what happened? He said, Manik-san, just look
at this

code. I was like, what's wrong with it? He

said, just come here and take a look and,

it was my first kind of introduction to what,

really, spaghetti code is like. Just like,
just look

at it. I can make no head or tail

out of this, where it starts and what method

is called and where I go and what, what

this is totally non-modular. This is the perfect
example

of what we can call spaghetti code. So I

realized, OK. But, I mean, subconsciously,
somewhere, I felt

humiliated, because these were like people
from my country.

Some even many years senior than me, and this

is what they delivered, that I'm sitting with
the

guy who has kind of taught me a lot,

and he's like sitting like this, so. Maybe
subconsciously,

I was not, maybe, entrepreneur yet, but maybe
somewhere

that incident, you know, planted that seed
in me

that, I need to change this. I need to

do something about this.

Also, while I was in Japan, I had my

first experience with Ruby. We, we, we were
mostly

working on Java, Cobra, Oracle - all that
enterprise-y

stuff. But we were using Ruby on the side.

And it was a new language at that point

of time. Even in Japan, not a lot of

people knew about it. But we were using it

for creating some utility scripts, where,
part, part of

it we were doing in Perl and some of

it we were doing with Ruby. So, that was

my first brush with Ruby.

And then in the year 2000, I was getting

married, so I talked to my fiancé and we

had this discussion, whether we wanted to
live in

Tokyo or live in Delhi, and we chose Delhi,

so I returned back to Delhi. And that is

when I actually founded Vinsol. This was September
of

2000. With two developers, one of my colleagues,
one

of my college mates joined me, and both of

us started this company.

We had this one Japanese client. It's, it's
very

easy actually to start a company if you have

a paying client already existing. So that
was, that

was good for us, very fortunate for us. We're

still working on Java, Cobra, Oracle. Whatever
little open

source interaction I had had worked with this
Ruby

script, which we did, but then due to financial

reasons we decided to move from Oracle to
PostGres.

That was really when I saw, like, we'd been

spending millions of yen on, on yen, yens?
Yen?

Millions of yen on, you know, the licensing
fee

for Oracle. But here we have a fully open

source free database available, which can
almost do as

much as - even sometimes, in some cases, more

than what Oracle could do. So that, that was

like kind of my first major interaction to
open

source software. So we decided to continue
to work

out of the basement of my house for a

couple more years.We would just kind of, you
know,

focusing on that single project.

But then we started getting some time available,
and

we thought, let's hire some people. So, we
hired

a few people and we thought we'd get more

Java projects, but the irony was that, you
know,

there are no Java projects for two people
team.

Java needs at least ten, twenty, thirty people.
You

can't do anything meaningful, like, not a
project. Like,

you can be a consultant, but to, to do

a full project, you, you need ten people maybe

minimum. So, that kind of forced us into the

direction of moving towards PHP, which is
like on

the string Facebook was launched, and kind
of picking,

it was built on PHP, so a lot of

people started asking for PHP projects.

And we looked at these two really good pieces

of software that were available then, Drupal
and Wordpress.

And that was where I got more involved in

open source, because we built some custom
Drupal modules

and extensions, Wordpress modules, Wordpress
extensions, and we were

one of those first companies in that, at that

time to launch what was a AJAX-based module
for

Drupal, which was like, we were happy. We
were

doing something. We were not making a lot
of

money, but it was enough to pay the bills,

and we were able to sustain a six-people team.

But then it was like almost 2005, and I

came across an article on Ruby on Rails in

an online magazine, and I was blown away.
Wow,

this is so cool. This is so productive. I

can do so much more in, in Rails in

a couple of hours than what, you know, I

could take days to do in PHP or Java.

And that was like really when I got hooked

onto Rails. And then the tipping point was
this

2006 barcamp. How many of you know about,
what

barcamps are?

They're not popular these days now, but like,
from

2006 to 2009, around that time, they were
very

popular. There are these two computer science
or programming

variables that we always use, foo and bar.
So,

in, in this context, they are not just names

but they are acronyms. So foo was, foocamp
was

a conference organized by O'Reilly. It was
called Friends

of O'Reilly. F-O-O. So they called it the
foocamp.

And it was like the elitist group of people

who'd come to get there by invitation only,
of

O'Reilly. And a few people who did not get

invited really felt bad about it, and they
wanted

to do something about it, so they started
this

thing called bar. So there's foo and there's
bar,

and bar has a, is again an acronym. It

stood for Bay Area Rejects. So everybody who
was

rejected and not a part of foocamp was, was

now invited or, like, it was a, event, they

called it the unconference. The only condition
you had

to be able to attend it was that you

have to present something or help in the organization.

You can't just go and be there.

You had to either present or help organize
it.

So it was an unconference. We had a first

one of these in Delhi in 2006. Jonathan Butal,

who is the founder of Slide Share was there,

their company also used to do a little bit

of, you know, Flash Ruby kind of work. SlideShare

was flash-based when it started. Now it's
moved completely

to html5, I think.

So, Jonathan and I got together, and we thought,

like, there's no tech community in Delhi.
We have

to do something about it. They have, they
have

a Delhi office and Jonathan was in Delhi at

that point of time. So we, we organized this

barcamp. And I made a presentation on Ruby
on

Rails. 90% of the audience had not heard about

Ruby on Rails. They just didn't know what
Ruby

on Rails was, which was good for us. The

presentation was like, it, it, it, there was
a

time when everybody who did an introduction
to Ruby

on Rails presentation, the title used to be,
Build

Your Blog in Fifteen Minutes. So I did the

same thing. It took me thirty, however. So,
I

build that blog, did a live demo, and you

know. It was org- it was organized at Adobe.

So they gave us their auditorium and we could

use it, about a hundred people attended, and
the

presentation went wild.

And it was like, cool. So we had more

work than we could handle. A lot of people

saw this presentation, and they read about
Ruby on

Rails, read about DHH, saw what 37Signals
was doing,

saw BaseCamp and they were like, OK. Our product,

also, we want to get built in Ruby on

Rails. And we started getting a lot of inbound

leads. And the six of us, at that point

of time, were like kind of swamped.

And so we also made decent money on the

side so that I could afford to go to

the RailsConf in Europe in 2006. So that's
me,

DHH, and Marcel Melina Jr., who what, used
to,

I think, work for 27Signals. But one of the

original guys who worked with DHH and released
Rails.

Now I think he works for Twitter.

So, the biggest thing there wasn't like, I
had

my interactions with open source software.
I had my

interactions with contributing to open source
software, not just

consuming it. Not just using it, like those
small

Wordpress plugins and Drupal modules. I had
done all

of that. But what really as huge, when I

was there at the conference was the community.
I

got to rub shoulders with DHH, Marcel Melina,
James,

Jim Weirich, Dave Thomas, David Black. All
these guys

were, where there, and I was like wow. This

is so cool. ANd it was like that, that

whole aura of being there with so many great

developers, people a thousand times smarter
than you, you

get to learn so much.

And that, once again set me thinking to, how

can I take some of this back home and

apply it? We, we had just kind of with

that back home and started a small community,
but

how could we grow it into something bigger?
How

could we really start producing more better
software back

in Delhi? So, what that lead to was, like,

I released my first RubyGem. We called it
VPayPal.

V was for Vinsol. So it was called VPayPal.

It was a kind of a Ruby wrapper around

the PayPal website payments pro library, a
wrapper around

PayPal website pro functionality that PayPal
provides. So that

was my first gem.

And then what I also did was encouraged a

lot of our developers to do, you know, to

contribute to open source software, to really
play a

role in that community, which I had experienced
when

I went for that European RailsConf. And the
name

that's mentioned there, number one is Sur
Max. He

is a developer that used to work for us.

And if you look at two and three, they

are at, at some point of time, they were

Rails core contributors. And this guy submitted
2162 patches,

which were accepted into Rails core in a month.

That means seventy patches a day. On average.

So, and he won the, this HackFest was organized

by a site called Working with Rails dot com,

which was like very popular at some point
of

time. So, so that's something, like, being
there with

the community and then contributing and encoring
other people

in our company to contribute finally, we got
some

recognition, which we were really proud of
at that

point of time. We still are.

Like, this was, if, if you look at this,

this is from Obi, Obi Fernandez, the founder
of

Hash Rocket. He gave a presentation at RubyFringe
2008,

where this was a slide which showed the competitive

landscape in Rails development firms today,
and we were

so happy to see Vinsol right there on the

left corner, bottom corner. We were elated.
We were

like wow, are we in this league? So it

was great, like. We were mentioned with ThoughtWorks,
HashRocket,

PivotalLabs. These were like, companies we
used to look

up to. Can we be like them someday? But

here, like, a guy picks, picks us. And not

any ordinary guy. He's the founder of Hash
Rocket,

who feels like Vinsol is a competitor to them.

We were like, yeah. We are doing something.
We

were happy.

So. But. Doing all this, like, we had not

spent a single dollar in marketing. The, the
only

way we had done all this was blogging, open

source contribution, and regularly attending
the RailsConf. So, just

doing all this, we, we came from, like, kind

of nobody, dabbling with Java, PHP, from a
basement,

to having a proper office, to help people
by

that time. And being counted as one of the

companies in Ruby on Rails services that matters.
People

look at us as competition.

And the good thing was, not Indian companies,
but

companies in U.S. HashRocket has their headquarters
in Florida.

So a company in Florida thinks of us their

competition. Which was good. OK. We've done
something. It

felt good.

So, today we are sixty people in three offices

in Delhi. But this'll continue to kind of
try

and build that culture and sustain that company
culture

that we had set up. So we, we built

our own training tool called VTApp, which
has these

tracks, which are owned by the experienced
developers. They

curate these tracks. They ensure that they
remain updated,

and they also review code by any- anybody
who

joins Vinsol has to go through this, do a

six months training on the job, paid training.
And

finish all these before had can be ready for

an internal project. After successfully doing
that, he's ready

for a client project.

So we, we just didn't want to be like

that, that experience that I had which I mentioned

being in that office with, with this great
Japanese

developer, Bakano-san, and he's sitting like
this. Really kind

of had that impact on me that I, I

thought like, we have to create something
that is

very different. not this huge, twenty-thousand
people working in

an office, nine to five developers not really
happy

about what they are doing. Maybe code monkeys,
if

I may use that term. No. We were going

to create a different company. We were trying
to

do something else.

So, gradually, like, all these tools came
into existence,

which kind of lead to us, lead us to

where we are today. Even, like, this is a

guy who's just joined our company, and we,
we

kind of in, encourage them to still continue
to

contribute to Rails core. This is as recent
as

three days ago. The last commit. Even if it's

a typo. Even if it's a documentation thing.
We

encourage people to go and, after you've finished
your

training, read through the Rails code and
do a

commit. If you find something wrong in Rails,
even

if it's a typo, don't worry. Don't hesitate.
Go

and, you know, send a pull request.

So we, we have like these, very, very new

just have started developing kind of guys
who are

making these commits. This is Thursday morning,
and it,

it's just a, a fix in the comment like,

the comment shouldn't be this. It should be
something

else. So we, we kind of have made it

mandatory.

The good thing is that out of sixty people

that I have mentioned, thirty, around thirty
are Rails

code contributors. Whatever be the patch.
But they've taken

the pains to go through the Rails internals
and

submit something. Submit what, whatever it
might be. Doesn't

really matter.

OK. So that was a little bit about the

history. About my background. So I'll quickly,
like, talk

about some of the clients and verticals we
work

in. One of the verticals in which we do

a lot of work is in e-commerce. Maybe because

I released that VPayPal gem, people thought
that I

knew a lot about e-commerce, so we just got

a lot of e-commerce projects. So, some of
the

recent and kind of more prominent work that
we've

done is, we were working on Ideeli, which
is

a flash sale site, head quarter in New York.

This was recently acquired by Groupon. So
we, we,

we were the development team which was working
on

this project.

There were other people as well, but we were

the core development team. I met the CTO of

Ideeli in the RailsConf three years ago, and
since

then we've been working together. So I said,
like,

no marketing other than just being here and
meeting

people.

Dealdey, this is very interesting. This, this
site was,

started as a Groupon clone, but really did
well.

It is now funded by Kinovich Ventures of Sweden.

And the guy who started this is, the Forbes

magazine recently wrote an article on the
ten more

influential or powerful men in Africa, and
Sim, who's

a Harvard educated guy from Nigeria, but wanted
to

do something for Nigeria, went back and started
this

site Dealdey. He was mentioned in Forbes.
And then

he has another venture, which even did better
than

- like, doing Dealdey, he saw like, this,
this

huge vacuum. A lot of deal sites exist, but

there is no really good reliable e-commerce,
basic e-commerce

site where you could just order something
and get

it in Nigeria, so he had this idea, and

we built Konga dot com for him, which is

now a MIH invested firm. It's a MIH portfolio

company, MIH Ventures of South Africa.

The really good thing about this project,
which I

am proud of, is, like, we built this in

two months. We took Scree as the platform,
and

then we had to add a bunch of features,

which were very specific to Nigeria. Like,
they needed

a wallet. But Spree does not - are you

aware of Spree? Has anybody? No. So Spree
is

an open source Ruby on Rails e-commerce application
that's

available. So you could just take that. But
it

is very limited. Like, the core functionality
is very

limited. But you would, again, add extensions
and get

a lot more done.

So, Vinsol actually, not only did we work
on

Konga and enable all the features that they
needed,

but we took the time to extract them and

make them available as extensions to anybody
who wants

to use them. So if you go to SpreeCommerce

dot com slash extensions, you can find all
these

extensions by Vinsol which are listed here.
So we

did Spree Wallet, Spree Bank Transfers, so
that people

could do a transfer to Konga and get their

orders fulfilled. Favorite products, admin
routes and access, shared

endpoint. Unified, GTP and Pava are three
gateways, very

popular in Nigeria. And then point of sale.
There's

a typo there. Poiiint of sale.

So these, these are like, and we built, and

I'm really proud of - we not only launched

this site in two months, we were even able

to kind of extract so much and make it

available to the community, to anybody who
wants to

use. These are also available on RubyGems.
These extensions

and a few other open source projects that
we

worked on.

And not only did we release it, we actuality

take the effort and the team is motivated
enough

to even provide support on open source stuff
that

we kind of roll out. LIke people come and

say, you know, I'm facing this problem. And
the

team, the team members actually take the pain
of

answering each and every request and closing
issues that

unknown people create on GitHub, like this,
an issue

with your open source software. The ideal
answer, or

the typical answer is, OK, it's open source.
Go

figure it out and fix it for yourself. But,

no, these guys have so much ownership of that

open source code that they release then, they
said,

no, we'll fix it for you. It took five

days maybe but they did it.

But the point is that that culture that we

were trying to build, and you know, by that,

in every person, I feel we've been fairly
successful

doing that. And, and SpreeCommerce was watching
all the

time what we were doing, and we became the

second firm, you know, to be labeled as SpreeCommerce

premium partners. There's RailsDog, which
is based in Washington.

They were the first firm, because that was
the

firm founded by Sean Schofield, who was actually
the

creator of Spree. Before creating Spree, he
was, he,

he had this consultancy, so he moved over
to

Spree and RailsDog became the first partner,
and we

were the second partner.

Now they have, like, I think nineteen partners.

Another site we helped build is WeWork. Have
you

guys heard of WeWork, which is a cool working

space in, like, ten cities in the, in the

U.S.? Ten plus cities. I think they are even

opening an office here in the West lower end

of Chicago. It's, it's a cool working space,
where

you can go there and you know, work, pay

by the day, half day, or get a monthly

office. So flexible working space in WeWork,
headquartered out

of New York. So we built their entire property

management system, and we, we also built the
collaboration

tool for people who are in that space, physically

working together, but don't know what the
other guy

does, what, what his specialization is. So
they could

use this tool to kind of get to know

each other virtually, and then find somebody
right sitting

right next to you maybe, and you can use

those skills.

Then, this is very interesting. Like, we worked
for

a product, and the product got funded by GreyLock,

and then GreyLock asks this client, who's,
who's your

tech team, who's doing all the work? Because
we

want to get, we like your product so much

that we want to get it done but he

same team. We want to kind of get rid

of our existing website and we want to seamlessly,

I, I built that blog.

So, it took me thirty, however, so I did

the same.

[audio issue]

-very different. It, well, it wasn't like
you couldn't

just take any out of box, see the solution

and implement it, so we, we built a custom,

the presentation was, Ruby on Rails was-

[audio issue]

-out of Detroit, Michigan. It, it started
by a

physician who helps others prepare for emergency
medicine examination.

It's original name was EMQB, Emergency Medical
Question Bank,

where you could go and prepare. This is interesting

because it's bootstrapped and profitable,
from BaseCamp. And they

were like what 37Signal was doing, DHH, and
so

I read about Ruby and Rails, read about-

[audio issue]

And, and over the years, we've done some work

from op- for OpenTable, Disney, Logitech,
Best Buy. The

reason I, I'm showing all this is that, which

leads us into the third part of this presentation.

Is, like minimal marketing, mostly word of
mouth and

partner relationships. So we've kind of built
these partner

relationships with agencies, with other developers
here, with development

firms, small development firm services, which
has allowed us

to work with clients like these, which is
like,

a team that, a company that doesn't even have

a marketing office in the U.S. they can land

clients like this.

OK. So I'll quickly talk about VinSol partnership
program.

That's the last part of the slide. Last part

of the presentation. So, who is it for? It's

for Rails developer having more work and less
time.

So they need help. Or if it's for smaller

consulting shops planning to scale their operations.
The, the

basic simple model that works, is like staff
augmentation.

We have a team there, if you want to

use that team to augment what you're doing
here,

you can contact us.

There, there are kind of variations of this
model,

which I'll skip for now. And for, for agencies,

like we have a model which is the technology

partner. That is how we worked on all those

projects for, like, Disney, OpenTable. We
do some work

for Chevron. Chipotle. The only reason we
can do

it is that we, partnered with these design
agencies,

brand agencies, advertising agencies who,
who know a lot

about design, but when it comes to technology,
they

need help, so they bring us in as partners.

And then the product owners, this is the most

interesting model. Like, you could build a
product or

you could just get your own team. Because,
we

could build a team for you. We have the

infrastructure. We've done it for ourselves.
We, we do

it for other people as well. One bonus you

get in doing this is like, if you're interested,

you could come and live in India, be with

the team, work with them. I mean, do the

MVP there or do the real one there, and

come back. It gives you two advantages when
is

that, the MVP gets done much faster if you're

there, and second is you know the team like

anything, you know each person what its, what
his

skills are, what his strengths or weaknesses
are, which

is like a huge plus when you have like

just three or four people running the whole
show.

And we've even done equity deals. So with
these

like kind of product owners who don't have
a

lot of capitol, we don't mind doing equity
deals,

though you want to start with a pure consultative

model, and then maybe feel that things might
work

out, we've, we've also done equity deals.

So, this would help you, you know, kind of

build scale, get scale, or get your product
build,

and it would really help me as well. Cause

I, I can, I don't really have to focus

so much on business then, which unfortunately
I have

to, in these last few years, because the team

size has grown and there's always that bolts
and

pressures or running a business. But I can
go

back to, you know, what I love doing, which

is coding.

Thank you.