Syntactic Sugar : Software application development, Outsourcing :

Merry Christmas

The Best Thesis of the Year

Competition The Best Thesis of the Year was announced by ABRA Software company at the end of September. One of the competitors was our longtime colleague Mirek Vavruška. In the interview below you can get to know a project with which Mirek entered into the competition or what he is working on at the moment.

Hi. Firstly, congratulations on the master’s degree you have just successfully obtained. How is it for you to be a fresh graduate?
To be honest, I haven't realized any big difference. At the end of my second year at University of West Bohemia I joined Syntactic Sugar. From now, you will just meet me in the office more often ;-). One of the things that every graduate experiences right after the graduation is not having student discounts and advantages anymore.

Why did you decide to sign up for The Best Thesis of the Year competition?
I signed up for the competition because I wanted to compare my thesis with the works of other students. I am quite a competitive type of person so this was a great challenge for me.

You signed up for two contests. What were the differences?
There was a big competition in both of them. Around 80 competitors signed up for each of these contests. There were 6 cathegories in the one announced by ABRA Software company. One of the cathegories, for which I signed up was „Corporate information systems“ in which I won the 1st place. In the other contest announced by Profinit company was only one common cathegory and I was on the 8th place.

Could you please shortly describe the project you entered the competition with?
Topic of my thesis is "InnoQ Document Management System". InnoQ is "InnoForss Quality Management System" in short. InnoQ is a quality control system defined by InnoForss institute. Huge amount of documents was developed when the Institut was creating this system. My task was to make an application that would help to effectively keep these documents under control.

Basically, it is a system for document administration that I have developed for finnish research institut. My first contact with the institut was during my study stay at HAMK University of Applied Sciences in finnish town of Forssa. InnoQ Document Management system is written in PHP and works under MySQL database. System is able to work with all common used MS Office and OpenOffice document formats. It is possible to search within documents. Interesting is that system is automatically able to convert documents into PDFs. Considering the international character of the project I have written my thesis in English.

How did the competition go?
The process of both of them was very similar. Jury selected the best works from all that were signed up and all selected went to final. During the final we were presenting our work to a professional jury and we were also answering all curious questions of the jury members.

How did you actually get to this project?
In Finland I recieved an offer to work on the project. I really liked the idea to solve a real business problem and to practice the communication with the customer in English. By the way, this experience was later on a big advantage for me in Syntactic Sugar. I got offers to participate on several projects but I liked this one the most. I liked that results of my work will be finally used in practice.

What are you currently working on?
Currently, I am working on a very interesting project for our customer from United States - Owen Software company. Goal of the project is to create a web application that helps students with choosing the field of study and future profession. The application includes three complex psychological questionnaires. As a result, there is a list of fields of study and professions that fit the student the most. ASP.NET 3.5 technology is used for implementation together with MS SQL 2008 database.

Thank you very much for your answers and I wish you a lot of working and personal achievements.
DThanks for the interview ;-)

Roman Sterly

Web e-commerce application ObchodCZ

We took over the web e-commerce application ObchodCZ in the moment when it weren’t fulfilling all specific requirements of our customer anymore. Our task was to recreate the original web application into an effective and modern tool. Tool that would be able to create a catalogue of e-shops and allow users fast and easy search within shops and goods.

The main aim of this project was to create a functional web application including data conversion from the former system. Application should be able to create a list of all registered shops, allow shop owners to register their e-shops, publish special offers and apply for paid services. The visitor of this site should be able to search in categorized e-shops, register for direct e-mails with news and special offers of particular e-shops. Another requirements were to create broader administrative interface for easy system administration and provide full support for the website including webhosting.

Cuting off the time needed for the application administration can be considered as one of the most important benefits. This fast and easy solution has helped to an effective work and thus lower the costs. Meanwhile, the number of registered users has increased thanks to a clear and user friendly interface and modern and fresh design of the application. Our client has also gained better and detailed overview of registered customers.

We have used the following technologies to develop this web application: PHP, MySQL, Zend, Smarty and Apache web server.

Check the application out at www.obchodcz.cz

Improving our own TRAC

TRAC is primarily a tool designed to divide tasks among team members. We have gone much further. By never-ending testing and creating our own plug-ins we have turned TRAC into a valuable assistant that directly and positively supports our internal business processes.

We made the first step in September 2007 when launching TRAC into the testing operation and using it also as a tool for counting hours we work off. Lots of other improvements were coming later on - for example project planning and it’s following checkup.

During few upcoming months we moved even further. We use TRAC to keep a record of all employees, applicants and also enquiries. TRAC has turned into a small CRM for us.

Recently, we have been working on sophisticated reports. Counting wages doesn't take 6 hours but only 30 minutes with their help. Other reports can be used by project managers, other will be used by our new colleague Sarka, who is responsible for HR. We certainly haven't forgotten other configurations, that allow us take an easy control over our worked off hours at all projects.

Launching an official program to support private projects of our employees can be considered as an important milestone. Roman and Swenia are the first who have their own fully modified TRAC environment including Subversion.

In April we had a lecture (not just) about our TRAC in the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen.

We have a mascot

New member has joined our team.

His name is Donkey and has two important positions.

Firstly, he is our new mascot that remains in our offices 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and all the time is watching the office and the work of all of us.

Donkey has also become a “narrator” of our regular company meetings. Basically, the only one who holds the Donkey is allowed to speak. This has helped us to create conditions where only one person has a word at the time. Thus company meetings are not turning into common discussions any more. Our meetings are now much more effective and nobody gets lost in the topic.

If you want to see what Donkey is like, take a look at Our team.
We wish Donkey lots of happy days and meetings with us.

New project SlusnyWeb.cz

The idea of this project was born months ago. The main aim of this internal project was to create a division of Syntactic Sugar. This division SlusnyWeb.cz would specialize in creating web presentations.

There is a long and usually not easy way from any idea to the realization itself. SlusnyWeb.cz was not an exception. Before launching we spent many hours discussing potential advantages and disadvantages, benefits, expenses needed for realization, SWOT analysis and planning.

Thanks to Swenia Toupalik all these plans and discussions have come true. Swenia has created the graphical face of this web presentation and is also its project manager. If you find our new services interesting and decide to cooperate with us, Swenia will be the one responsible for fast and quality realization of your new website.

Check it out on www.slusnyweb.cz/en/introduction

Visitors from USA

The oldest project of Syntactic Sugar is cooperation with Owen Software company on a product called Pathevo.

Thanks to the distance between us and our partner, discussions about additional requirements, consultations and regular communication is happening via the internet. However, a personal visit is necessary once in a while. Mr. Adeboyejo Oni the owner of the Owen Software company came to see us in July with his son Muyiwa. On the agenda of this four days visit were, except working issues, also cultural events. Big thank you belongs to our colleague Mirek Vavruska who took care of our guests from their arrival to the airport. I think that especially perfectly prepared agenda helped to a general satisfaction with this visit.

We were also very pleased by appreciation of Mr. Oni. One of the facts that Mr. Oni especially highlighted was the growth of the company. At his last visit to Plzen year and a half ago, we were a small company with a few projects and employees. This time many more employees, externals and co-workers came to a company lunch. We were also commended for the atmosphere and work attitude that could be seen in our offices.

Appreciation from customers or business partners warms the heart of any worker. I dare to say that even motivate to a further work. Obviously, we will keep going this way to make as many customers and partners feel the same.

Secondary school students gaining work experience in Syntactic Sugar

Two secondary school students spent the last two weeks in May with us in terms of compulsory school work experience. The main aim was to show them how the company works and what it means to be a part of the real working process.

From the work they managed during their stay I could mention data check and purification for example. These data were afterwards imported to the database of our project ObchodCZ.cz. Students also helped with testing the application. Furthermore, they updated photos from a charity event organized by Rotary Club Pilsen “1st Rotary Charity Golf Cup Pilsen 2008”. Photos can be found at web pages of Rotary Club Pilsen. Last but not least I can mention testing of company web pages, hardware support and so on.

Thank you goes to both students for all the work they have done. We hope they enjoyed it and gained new knowledge and experinece at the same time.

New positions in Syntactic Sugar

With a monthly regularity I present in few lines our new employees that have joined our team. For this time I am not going to mention only new people but also brand-new positions.

Because of the progressive development of our company the need of having positions like consultant – analyst, lawyer, etc. has grown up. Existence of such needs reflects the real growth of the company.

Petra Lavičková and Tomáš Řehák have become our new consultants – analysts. External legal consultancy will encure Hynek Horák who is also going to help in IT area thanks to his technical background. Honza Zeman and Matyáš Latner have joined our team of developers as PHP developers. The youngest on business is Petr Lang C# developer.

Working reinforcement

I have already mentioned in some of the previous articles that our company is focused on external cooperation. Therefore, we welcome our new colleagues, workmates and friends this way. This month will not be an exception.

Two people have decided to join our team this month. Roman Sterly and Swenia Toupalik. Roman was hired on the position of sales manager but his position has soon become wider. He is also responsible for marketing and public relations. Swenia is a part of the technical part of the company. She is responsible for everything that has something to do with graphics.

We wish both of them to enjoy everything they do.

Special staff meeting

Every first Thursday in a new month we hold a staff meeting. Sometimes more sometimes less in working spirit. First Thursday in April was special. Instead of the usual staff meeting we played a game.

I think it is no need to stress how important is to know well all your colleagues and workmates. The main aim of the game we went through together was to get known ourselves and also each other better. During the game we were split into several groups in which we were solving different tasks. At the end we realized that each group had some specific characteristics that were very different from other groups. It is more that obvious that we are all very different people. The main goal was to realize the differences between groups, analyze them and finally try to understand. We practised how to communicate effectively between us, how to pass the message considering our intro or extroversive preference.

During the game we were split into 4 groups. For every group was typical one colour. At least for that night we were green, blue, red or yellow. Since that evening such sentences as „Yes, I understand. I have forgotten you are green“ can be heard in our office. Fact that the game have left its positive footprints at us is doubtless.

Renewal of a bodyshopping contract

Bodyshopping is one of the services our company offers. The question what bodyshopping actually is answered our employee Petr Dvorak. Recently, he has been rent to CCA company.

“Every software project comes through a variable stages of development. Specification of requirements, project processing, programming, testing and so on. Such phases differ also in size of the team. At the beginning the working teams are usually smaller and are constantly changing during the project. Obviously, it is most profitable for the company to have an exact number of employees.

It is very hard to find quickly qualified people without losing months needed for trainings in this branch. One of the possible solutions is bodyshopping. It is a kind of cooperation when the specialist works at the clients place and becomes a part of his team.

There are many implicit advantages at this kind of cooperation. The company that rents the developer can gain an independent source of income and reduce the fixed costs. For the other company such person can mean a different point of view on problems and can also help with his unique experience. Rented specialist is not becoming the other side’s employee. Therefore, the company is not taking the risk of people getting ill or dismissing its own employees.

What bodyshopping means from the employee’s point of view? Basically, it means different working environment, operating principles, company culture, different technologies and processes. Therefore, it can be compared to changing the employers. The main difference is in higher expectations and requirements from the company from the very beginning. The rented developer has to approve his knowledge and skills. Moreover, if there is some work transition happening at the first company people can get very busy. Fortunately, when the developer gains more experience with the new project such situation is over soon.

Having such experience is undoubtedly a great advantage. It is also more than interesting to compare how software is done somewhere else. Moreover, it is a great chance to gain new knowledge and meet new people.”

Fact that we have agreed with the CCA company to renew the contract evidences the satisfaction on both sides and advantages that body-shopping brings.

The most important things you should know about Syntactic Sugar

Did you know that:

… company Syntactic Sugar was founded in autumn 2006

… the beginnings of Syntactic Sugar can be dated back to the year 1998 when Tomas Holub started the software development business

… company management for the year 2007 ended up with a slight profit

… the oldest project is Pathevo for the Owen Software company. The project has lasted with some short breaks from 1999.

… for our projects we have used technologies and methods as following (in alphabetical order): ASP.NET, C, C#, C++, Excel, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, MS SQL, MSF, SEO, SQL stored procedures, T-SQL, VB.NET, Web Services, XHTML, XML

… all current employees used to work in Syntactic Sugar as externals

… five colleagues have visited USA in terms of the business trip and 3 have been to Germany

… we worked for clients from the following cities (in alphabetical order): Boyds, Dornbirn, Karlsruhe, New York, Plzeň, Praha, Rockville, Washington D.C.

… results of our projects can be found in following branches (in alphabetical order): car sale, education, engineering, finance, medicine, travelling

… currently we are Microsoft registered partner and we plan to become a Microsoft certified partner. We support further education and certification of our employees

… Syntactic Sugar offers not only outsourcing of software development but also web application development

… at the beginning of March 2008 Syntactic Sugar had 4 full-time employees and 14 externals

… 17% of all employees and externals are women

… average age of people working in Syntactic Sugar is 25 years

Lectures From Syntactic Sugar for Students of the University of West Bohemia

All university students has certainly experienced sitting through tiring lectures, which are for the most part concerned only with theory. Ing. Brada from the Faculty of Applied Sciences of the University of Western Bohemia, however, decided to conceive his subject differently. He divided the subject matters that he is teaching and he offered the individual topics to companies.

Thus, students have opportunity to receive information about the given issues from practice and from professionals. In this respect, we have been cooperating with ZČU (University of Western bohemia) for several years already and this year's semester is no exception. The lectures awaiting us are even two. One deals with the topic: „Various styles of project management“, where we focus on the impact of the customer's approach on the course of the project. The lecture will be of course centered mainly on practical experiences from two larger and very different projects. The second topic, that we can surely base on practical experiences, is: „Advanced use of and experiences with the system TRAC“. The principal points of this lecture will be planning, estimates and accounting for the time spent on the project, continuous integration, etc. Work with the TRAC is a daily bread for all employees of the Syntactic Sugar and so we hope that this lecture given by us will be a pleasantly spent hour for the students.

Update of the Web

Modernisation and development of the web is closely related to the modernisation and development of the society. Especially with regard to a software company. Since we are still expanding the base of our workforce and the number of successfully completed projects and used technologies is increasing, also contacts of employees have been mounting up.

A great merit of the graphical and programming changes of the web can be contributed to the external employee Ondra Pillár and Ing. Tomáš Holub, for his part, has found a time in his evenings to update texts and other informations. In contrast with the previous version, this new one was expanded by the bookmark „souhrnné informace (summarized information)“. This should serve mainly for people, who have no time to browse through the web, but are searching for brief and general information about the company. Another addition is „partneři (partners)“ and extended references. More detailed descriptions of the successfully realized projects should especially convince the potential customer about our qualities. We also added search, news from events related to the company, and others. The main effort, as I already mentioned, is to extend information, add functions, while disrupting the structure and appearance of the web as little as possible. You can judge yourselves, whether we managed to do it.

A company signature or another drop added into the cup of visibility

Promotion is a word that makes many people shudder. But noone will learn about even the best and highest-quality product, if it is not sufficiently promoted. Awareness of the public of what we are doing increases probability that both acquaintances and randomly addressed people will become our customers. It would be ideal to focus just on one form of promotion. However, in today's world full of advertising and information lurking for us on every step it is simply not enough.

And so we – as a company – bet on a hot favourite: quantity. We will take advantage of any small supporting promotion that would make the Syntactic Sugar visible as an enterprise. Our next drop into the cup of visibility is the company signature this time. It is short, smooth, unified for all employees and it is automatically attached in the end of every mail sent from our company address.

Would you like to see its particular appearance? Write to info@syntacticsugar.com, we will be glad to send you one as an example.

Project Pathevo – another challenge for our developers

Projects such as Pathevo certainly pertain to the list of projects that brought us new experiences and knowledge. We are just in the phase of testing of a new system that makes it possible to execute an order via internet and to pay via pay-pal at the same time.

Christmas distraction at bowling

What kind of Christmas it would be without a proper company party... The attached photographic documentation needs no comment, I think.

Re-design of the web of the cycling diary Peloton

The main work content of the Syntactic Sugar is to solve each customer requirement. And above all successfully. Another challenge for us is undoubtedly improvement of the web of the cycling magazine Peloton.

We got the web as such in quite a high-quality version. The requirement from orderers though was: „To Improve and Extend“. Ondra Kvasnička, a regular member of our team, took charge of this with enthusiasm and responsibility and currently he is fully engaged by coordination of the entire project. The web is created by means of the editorial system Drupal, which is used for facilitation of content administration. Interesting functions offered to visitors by peloton.cz are for example publication of articles, release of news, insertion of videos, participation in various discussions or possibilities of chat. New peloton.cz will be a refreshing, modern web, which will enable its readers to participate significantly in creation of its content.

Attendance System from Syntactic Sugar

Our successfully completed projects include also the Syntactic Sugar Timesheet. It is a biometric attendance system that was developed to facilitate monitoring of arrivals and exits of employees in the company. The program cooperates with a fingerprint scanner, which guarantees authenticity of the acquired data. Summations of hours worked are automatically calculated and at the end of the month, an attendance sheet is generated in the Excel format.

Are you interested in details? Download the trial version of the program.

The day of Open Doors

The day of Open Doors. The first event of its kind that took place in our company. Even though we certainly have a lot to improve till the next time, allow me to state that it was a very successful day after all. We showed visitors how we live here and we tried to introduce both the formal and informal face of the company to them.

All participants had a unique opportunity to familiarize themselves with our realized and still proceeding projects, to debate with regular and external employees, to receive a small refreshment and to participate in a darts match. A very friendly ambience ruled for the entire day in the offices. The atmosphere in the company and the job opportunity addressed some visitors so much that they decided to become our new colleagues.

Microsoft Fest

A continuous educating of employees is an integral part of a well functioning company. This was one of the reasons why a few interested people from our ranks set out to the Microsoft Fest. Even the company's director, Ing. Tomáš Holub, was present there. Lectures on interesting topics took place both on Saturday and on Sunday.

After each day filled by information, organizers and lecturers posed a few control questions. The most quick and correct answer was awarded a prize. Both on Saturday and on Sunday, Mr. Holub managed to assert himself and to say the correct answer first. Thus he did not miss the above mentioned prize and he brought home a web camera and a book according to his own choice. From the whole offer, one of the thickest finally won – ASP.NET. The entire weekend was interesting not only because of the awarded prizes but also due to newly acquired knowledge and interesting information, which were brought by the participants from Prague.

Not everything is perfect

We were able to verify that nothing in this world is perfect … not even systems, not even servers. Unfortunately. An unpleasant discovery was that our server, which we call by an in-house name Hummer, broke down. After a thorough analysis we found that one disc in  RAID actually failed.

Fortunately, due to regular back up, no serious loss of data occurred and so the greatest piece of work consisted of creation of a temporary solution and putting it into operation. Critical systems were eventually, for the time of the repair, transferred to our server in the backbone network in Prague. However, a finding positive for us was that even in such critical cases we can cope with the situation in such a way that it does not disrupt and limit the operation of our company.

Contract with Campi

We successfully completed the analysis and signed a contract with the company Campi. Our work lies in development of an application, which the company Campi will offer to financial institutions. With regard to the foreign origin of the company, this application will be used not only in the Czech Republic but also in Slovakia, which is the place of origin of the company. Campi also operates in the Romanian market, so that our work in the form of the above mentioned web application for financial sphere will also go to the East. Many employees of Syntactic Sugar participate in creation of this application, but the key person responsible for the correct proceeding of the work is our senior programmer Míra Štěpánek.

Our visit in Germany

Each day we spend long hours by engaging our brain cells. Last weekend, 2/3 of regular employees decided to let their brains rest and to warm up other parts of their bodies. They exchanged formal suits for sporting outfits and set out collectively for the marathon in in-line skating in Berlin.

The whole sporting event even produced several good results. One of the most important undoubtedly is the fact that they managed the entire 42 kilometers and everybody arrived to the finish alive and healthy. Souvenir medals, which they brought from this skating battle, are now proudly swinging at various places both in our office and elsewhere. No wonder. The people in question can be rightfully proud of such performance. Some of the participants are already looking forward to another sporting challenge, while others are glorifying beauty and comfort of an office armchair. The fact that it was a real battle is proven by the photographic documentation taken „at the venue of the action“.

But foreign countries do not open their doors to us only by their sporting events. An event very significant for us is the progressing cooperation with the German company Planta. Our developer Ondra Kvasnička spent 3 nice working weeks directly at the company in Germany. The entire project is proceeding very positively and the international cooperation proved so useful that Ondra is setting out to Germany for the second time and this time he is taking with him Mirek Vavruška, who starts to work on the project using the Skype and programming language C#.

New facelift of our premises

The quantity of work performed is undoubtedly influenced by agreeable colleagues, sun behind the windows, ambience of the workplace and appearance of the office as such. To enhance the quality of the working process, we decided to give a new facelift to our working areas. This time we were not afraid to use brighter colours and the result pleasantly surprised us all.

Curious people will soon be able to eyewitness our performance. That is to say: we are preparing a Day of Open Doors and the coloured walls will definitely not be the only interesting thing there. Maybe the pictures will give you a little idea of how our entire working weekend proceeded.

Extension of the working group

Our working group has been newly extended by two members. Láďa Šalom has become a new member of the developer team, in which he will hold the position of C# programmer. Šárka Donátová has become another external colleague, who will be in charge of both PR and the quality and quantity of external communication and presentation of the company