Q&A With Boston's Newest Dev Shop: Terrible Labs

It takes a certain swag to call your company 'terrible' and Joe Lind and Jeremy Weiskotten may have it. Their latest venture is called Terrible Labs and it's a development firm specializing in Ruby on Rails, Node.js and iOS/Android applications. Although Terrible Labs is new, both Lind and Weiskotten are local vets; they held developer positions at SCVNGR and PatientsLikeMe after both working at Blueleaf.com. They were kind enough to answer questions about Terrible Labs (TL) over email. BostInno: Why did you decide to start your new company? TL: We started Terrible Labs because a lot of companies, big and small, miss out on great opportunities due to a lack of quality technical resources. Unemployment is high overall, but talented software developers are still in demand. We know first-hand how hard it is to recruit and retain great people. It's not right for every project, but outsourcing development work to a local, battle-tested, high-performing team can be a great option. Terrible Labs can help a startup launch their MVP and hire and train a team, or simply add bandwidth to an existing team. BostInno: What's the team size now? TL: Four (including Lind and Weiskotten). We expect to add a few employees as we ramp up some new projects, but have already added Aaron Graves, senior developer, and Phil Duffy, junior developer. BostInno: When someone thinks about Ruby on Rails in Boston, thoughtbot is probably the first name that comes to mind. What are your thoughts on competing with thoughtbot for development projects here in the Hub? Weiskotten: We love thoughtbot. I can't think of a company that has contributed more to the Rails community through open source software and incredibly useful development and collaboration products. Our potential client bases may overlap, but there's plenty of demand for premium design and development services in Boston right now. There's also a strong overlap in our business models and tool expertise, but there might be some subtle differences in our process and culture, so we'd definitely encourage anyone considering thoughtbot to also get in touch with us! BostInno: What type of clients are you going after? TL: We're working with startups and more mature companies on web-based and mobile projects. We love the clients that we're working with now because they collaborate with us in an iterative process. Rather than taking a detailed spec and delivering a perfect product (which never works), we craft a better solution by reacting to client and user feedback in short cycles. Our clients look to us to help set up the right processes and tools for them, and we have the experience to make informed decisions and the humility to make adjustments as needed. BostInno: What are your thoughts on the development scene here in Boston? TL: We're planning some really exciting events to increase awareness and collaboration between local companies and developers. Our first of a series of recurring events, "APIs & IPAs", will feature the RunKeeper Health Graph API. We invite anyone interested in learning about this API, building a cool app, and drinking IPAs (or whatever) to join us at the Gemvara office (near South Station) on Sunday, September 11. For more information or to sign up, check it out here. More events are coming, which you can find out about via Twitter (@terriblelabs). We're personally active in the Boston Ruby Group and some startup-related meet-ups. There's a lot of activity in the Boston developer community, but so many interesting startups and talented developers still fly under the radar. This probably won't come as a huge surprise, but developers generally tend to be introverted and don't always stray outside of their comfort zones. BostInno: When would you recommend using node.js? Are there potentially any downsides to using node at this point in its development? TL: Node.js has a lot going for it. The momentum and energy in the Node community reminds us a lot of what Rails looked like a few years ago. Great new open source Node libraries are popping up every day and tasks that used to seem difficult (real-time chat in a web app, for example) are increasingly straightforward to implement so we get to focus on the business value of the apps we’re building. It's extremely fast and highly scalable, and can be a very productive framework, but the ecosystem is still maturing. If you've tried to hire a Ruby or even Java developer and thought that was tough, Node.js is tougher right now -- not because there are so many projects using it, but because there simply aren't a lot of developers out there with a lot of experience in it yet. BostInno: What kind of work do you do for iOS/Android devices? Mobile application development or mobile web development or both? TL: We've built native iOS apps and HTML5-based mobile web interfaces that interact with a Rails-based backend. This isn't a strong core competency for us (relative to traditional web development with Rails), but we anticipate continued growth in the mobile space and will ramp up our skills and team as needed.