Feb
24

2016 State of the Union

CLIENTS, CREW MEMBERS, FRIENDS, FAMILY, AND FELLOW AMERICANS: WELCOME TO LUNARLINCOLN’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS (2016 edition).

If year one was a quiet tiny team of two, and year two was a crazy rollercoaster of growth, year three was a lot of figuring out the finer points of business and moving onward and upward. What comes after the giant hurdles? The answer is hundreds of tiny hurdles. (And overcoming those tiny hurdles is surprisingly painful – similar to stomping on Lego’s in the dark – who knew?). But now that we’ve stomped all those hurdles and arrived here at 2017, I have to admit looking around that we did a pretty awesome job. We built so many new things this year, in so many different areas. We got smarter, we got stronger, and we even made a teeny bit of money in the process.

 

But I digress, let’s get down to our favorite thing every. single. year. The Work!

The Work

We added several new and diverse clients: Bkon, Camping with Dogs, GoNoodle, HealthHere, Lasso, TReAD Lab, Pacecoach, Oak Hill School, Revl, Subpac, Synchronous Health, Tandum, and VDCI …whew I think that’s it. (Totally didn’t realize it was this many clients, holy crap you guys!)

With these guys (and gals) we got to work on all sorts of new things:

Some have shipped and are available for your pocket computer right now. Some were featured and reached #1 app in Apple’s App Store. Some were used at events with tens of thousands of attendees. Some helped people do their jobs better than ever before. Some help you get out there and get moving.  Some are still in progress. Some we haven’t even mentioned above because they are too cool and top secret to be hinted at as of yet. We’ve added many of them to our Work page with greater detail, along with our amazing clients saying amazing things about yours truly. Check it out!

The Team

You can’t do the work without the team, and we’ve assembled a stellar team….I would almost say they are rockstar developers…but I won’t because that terminology is stupid. They’re really, really good. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

This year, we had our first interns (MLK class of 15) and we welcomed Cory Wilhite to the crew. There were many Friday lunches, a single ice cream truck quest (found it after weeks of hearing it!), several arguments over code abstraction, and as always: general hijinks.

 

The Community

We wouldn’t be here without the love and support of the Nashville community, be it developer or mobile dev aficionados. This year we put our money where our mouth was and sponsored several events. Some of which we spoke at and some of which we merely cheerleaded from the audience. Each of these events and groups are great examples of creativity and innovation that is flourishing in Nashville.

The Future

So what’s next? Definitely more of the same and hopefully more of better things.  In the meantime we’ll keep building, keep coding, keep working with the community, and we’ll keep checking back with you as the year progresses.

Here’s to LunarLincoln in 2017!

Love and gratitude,

Jennifer, Wiley, Travis, Patrick, and Cory

 

 

Feb
15

2015 State of the Union

Clients, Crew Members, Friends, Family, and Fellow Americans: welcome to LunarLincoln’s State of the Union address.

What a difference a year makes. What an incredible rollercoaster ride. We experienced so many highs last year, and we rode out the lows knowing that they were necessary to gain the momentum needed to reach the next peak.

Halfway through 2014, Wiley, Travis, and I (Jennifer) had just joined forces and were working out of a windowless 100 sq ft office attempting to pretend that we knew how this “running a company” thing works while writing code. Here we are taking a group photo and bemoaning moving out of our first office:

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Since then, we’ve said hello to new team members Todd, Ben, Patrick, and Jack. And then said goodbye again to Todd as he headed off to the big Apple (Cupertino, not NYC).


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We moved into a palatial residence (bigger than our own house) and we began what has become a pretty impressive collection of moon AND Lincoln memorabilia.

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But lets get to the interesting stuff:
Code. Apps. Creating Things. Amazing Clients.

We’ve worked on so many interesting projects. Some we can shout from the rooftops and some we can’t. Some of those we can talk about are on our snazzy new portfolio section of the website – go look at it, its beeeyutiful.

Cool things we got to learn more about last year
Items we shipped publicly (mmm, yes shipping)

We volunteered a ton. We pulled all-nighters at hackathons. We explained how pocket computers work to high schoolers. We gave talks to our fellow developers and also exchanged heated words at usergroup cage matches.


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We made a ton of new friends at events around town and across the country

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We did a bad job podcasting. We did a better job making our internal processes even stronger. And we’re building things for ourselves.

  • Finally finishing our own internal CI/CD system
  • Building a reporting platform to augment our JIRA instance
  • Starting on some products of our own (more details on that coming soon)
  • What happened to NSVille? (Ask @microchip128 & @ianbroyles to get back on the wagon)

 

It was a good year. Based on everything above – I’m not sure how we’re alive, but I can’t wait to do it all over again.

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Love, love, love (and code),
Jennifer (and the guys) (and Abe)

Jul
20

Better, Stronger, Faster

“Gentleman, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability. We can make it better than it was. Better, stronger, faster.”

Please excuse my take on the Six Million Dollar Man quote but it’s true. With more minds, more space, and better tools we’re really excited for all that we can build in 2015…and beyooooooond (wait, that one is Toy Story).

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For our clients we can now build more, faster. We have a greater breadth of experience with our five developers to better serve niche specialties.  More developers also equals more manhours or wo-manhours available. Is your startup blowing up (in a good way?) – yes we can double our scope this week and yes someone on our team has unique insights into the code you need built.

On the internal side we can now devote more time to infrastructure (build servers, client information portals, moar expert-dev blogging). We now also have time to build detailed processes for the many, many things that revolve around building apps that aren’t just development – like marketing, QA testing, user testing, prototyping, and launch plans.

Come test drive our improvements yourself. Work with us to make the future of mobile development better – one Six Million Dollar Project at a time.

 

Jul
17

No we don’t have a foosball table

We moved offices a few months ago. Our first office (if you could call it that), was a 100 sq ft basement room in Center615. To get an idea of how small 100 sq feet is – it is approximately the size of your home bathroom or a modest walk in closet. When Jennifer joined Wiley and Travis in October – the closet office suddenly became less “cozy” and more like a claustrophobic nightmare.


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We needed a new office.

After some meh searching of Craigslist and the awful, ugly, un-usable commercial real-estate sites out there we found TenantBase. It was great. The people were great, the listings were great. The weird size/pricepoint we needed no longer seemed to be a problem. So after signing a terrifying 50-page lease (no hermit crabs, no using the office shower), we were in.

To here.

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Why thank you. I know. It’s great.

We love the space.  We love filling it with the very best developers and designers and being the preferred place for client meetings. Creating a comfortable work environment is important for quality work. We may not have all the fancy-fun trimmings of San Francisco startups, but we have what you need for a solid day of coding. A couch to chill on, a coffee pot for chemical energy, and a candy dish that mysteriously empties itself at least once a week.

We also really enjoy being in Germantown. Despite rivaling the Gulch in ongoing construction, the ever changing view from the conference room window is pretty entertaining. Plus we have oh so excellent neighbors, including XOEye, Mountain, Onin Group, Tempured European Indulgence (yum chocolate), and the Skillery, just to name a few. Now all we need are a fewwww more lunch places to make the neighborhood perfect. (I can’t live on Cupcake Collection forever).

 

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