Being Fearless. Being Elastic. How we use the cloud.

The cloud means different things to different people. To us, it means two things:

Being Fearless

In my previous life, I worked with large corporations with dedicated IT teams. Getting new machines for R&D, messing up their machines were all so common. This also meant: fear of bureaucracy and fear of messing up a shared system. So much of my energy would have been diverted to managing this fear (meaning, the energy lost is lost for innovative work). Now, working and defining PatchSchools Company culture, the most important decision for me has been giving my engineering team the freedom to innovate. Freedom to innovate typically translates to freedom to fail. The cloud infrastructure at PatchSchools facilitates this. If a infrastructure is messed up, just kill it and bring a new one!

Being Elastic

• Our development environment is not used during our night time. The whole infrastructure, including the cluster nodes, load-balancers and databases are brought down and terminated. In the morning, they are created anew. For a bootstrapped startup like us, this has amounted to good percent of cost saving.


• Our production environment has auto-scaling configured. This configuration helps in scaling up our business with very less expenditure for IT staff.

All in all, the cloud has increased our ability to innovate and reduced cost substantially.

We Listen. We Act. We are the PatchSchools Support!

Support makes or breaks relationships. Have you experienced any of these:

• Navigating through endless options in IVR menu just to speak with a customer service representative?


• Spoke with a totally clueless representative who keeps repeating what is in his book?


• Sent a support mail request, and got no reply for days together?


• The customer care number is always busy?

All of us must have undergone these pitiable incidents at least few times in our life. The immediate feeling which we get is, we are not being cared for. The connection and trust with the brand is broken the moment this happens.

At PatchSchools we want to give the best customer support experience. The support framework is what keeps us in ground with reality, gives access to valuable customer feedback and one that keeps us connected with the customers.

For achieving this, we have selected ZenDesk. Opening a support request is as simple as sending a mail to support-at-patchschools-dot-com. And the people handling support is not a bunch of inexperienced guys sitting with a handbook, but are the founders, engineers and partners of PatchSchools.

We take support seriously.

New Employees Handbook

Get our New Employees Handbook!

Machines never have any extra parts

I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and types of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason, too.

The above quote is from the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. We at PatchSchools also take this philosophy of minimalism and usefulness to heart. For instance, our complete infrastructure runs on Amazon AWS. Just like our development model, our infrastructure also works only when we need it to work. Other times, it just shuts itself down. Our scripts and configurations actively identify unused infrastructure and terminates them.

What businesses can learn from OpenSource?

I have been running various OpenSource projects under the banner of WizTools.org for more than 8 years now. By virtue of this association, I have learned some amazing insight into working as a team, being inspired, and building and delivering awesome products with literally zero budget. Some facts are strange: The team doesn't see each other's face. Nevertheless we are a team, and we deliver more than a team put together in a room. We don't have any monetary incentive to perform. But we perform better than a employee at Microsoft. By understanding these seemingly irrational culture of productivity, businesses around the world can learn few tips:

• We like to scratch our itch. Most OpenSource projects start as a solution to a existing problem. Businesses must focus on identifying existing problems and providing solutions for them.


• The developers are inspired by higher motive than money. It may be changing the world with a better software, getting the recognition of expertise from our peers, or just the satisfaction of programming a great piece of software that I personally can use. Money is a basic need of all in our economy. As Maslow said, once the basic needs are satisfied, Great Programmers look for satisfaction beyond what money can buy. Businesses must be able to identify these self-actualisation needs of Great Programmers and provide them a platform for pursuing it.


• Physical proximity does not mean much. With tools like chat, IRC, version control systems, bug trackers, mailing lists, emails, voip and others, physical proximity does not matter. For example, I have in the past worked with people from the US, China and Bahrain. I have never seen them. But we have worked as a team to build some great pieces of software. The concept of physical offices do not mean much to me. Being in office does not ensure I deliver great work. It just means I submit my presence reluctantly. Great work is done when in Flow, with zero distraction. Office rarely provides such environment. Business must provide maximum flexibility for workers to work anytime, anywhere.


• The OpenSource developers are always in touch with the customers (users of the product). We have mailing lists and issue trackers to get immediate feedback from the actual users. This keeps us in touch with the ground realities. It is imperative for businesses to understand their customers and build tools and services which solve their real problems. And provide simple-accessible-tools for the clients to give feedback.


• OpenSource projects don't have managers, supervisors, or people who do nothing other than managing. All contributors dirty their hands with ground work. This minimises the risk of over-eager managers who are disconnected with reality running the show. Businesses should always aim at hiring leaders who are in touch with Engineering reality.

We at PatchSchools aim at building a culture of OpenSource within our organisation.

A Team without Managers?

PatchSchools does not have traditional roles like Managers or Supervisors. We believe everyone in the organisation should be comfortable doing trench work. Trench work---programming, IT administration, support emails and calls, field work---helps us to be in touch with reality. And more importantly, we believe that people need not be supervised or managed. But we do believe that people need to be inspired and motivated through proper communication of vision.

PatchSchools Feature Walkthrough (11 minutes video)

A Company for Engineers

PatchSchools is founded by Engineers. We love building things. And we want to build this Company as place where Engineers love to work. Few things we practice to ensure this:

• Full flexibility: work from anywhere, work anytime, flexible leaves.


• No timesheet.


• Use of state-of-the-art-communication tools including BitBucket, Unfuddle, HipChat.


• Everybody understands what it is to be in a Flow. Expect minimal distraction (read: minimal meetings).


• Agile infrastructure: Jenkins, Amazon AWS.


• And a reasonably good list of technologies to work with: PHP, Java, REST, Scaling, Memcache, Amazon Cloud, Android, Objective-C and any other technology which any Engineer has the power to influence.


• Work with talented Engineers.


• No managers.

Finding the Best Engineering Talent

The world is a vast place. The best engineers are scattered in locations across the world. That is why we at PatchSchools believe that recruitment of engineers must not be confined to the location we are placed in (PatchSchools is based out of Chennai, TN, India). The technology and communication tools have so beautifully evolved in the past few years that remote working is no longer an impediment to productivity, but to the contrary, an advantage. That is the reason we have subscribed to services like Unfuddle, BitBucket and HipChat.

 

Remote working is being effectively used by various enviable companies like 37Signals and Automattic. So it is not something new. Also, I myself have been working-from-home (I prefer to call my bedroom-converted-office as The Lab) for the past 3 years. My own experience and the examples of companies I mentioned, has proved beyond doubt that Engineers love Freedom. Freedom to work from any location. Freedom to build a Awesome Company!

 

Note: We are recruiting Software Engineers only from India. This is a temporary-decision we have taken to keep our bookkeeping simple. Follow this blog for updates on our recruitment policy.

Organization structure?

Every organization has structure. For example, in a typical Software business we have the Engineering project hierarchy as: PM > Architect> Lead > Module Lead > Senior Developer > Developer > Intern. In contrast to this traditional structure, PatchSchools is organised not into hierarchy, but clusters:

 

 

We as a group, insist on being driven by only one thing: our vision. We organise ourselves into clusters to make this vision a reality. And needless to say, the clusters are dynamic and ever changing to meet our business and client needs.

Our Vision

The Joy of Building a Company

Can there be a greater joy than building a company? The joy of Building a Dream. Setting up a Team. The Engineering Challenges. Bringing up Infrastructure. Brainstorming Business Model. The Pitches. The First Sale.

I don't think so :-)

We are a Startup. We have a Vision.

We are PatchSchools. We have a vision. Vision to change the education sector. Wait for more info ;-)