Adam Mordecai – Advomatic

Adam Mordecai is co-founder of Advomatic a small web technology firm specializing in Strategy Consulting, Website Development, and Hosting for progressive non-profit advocacy organizations.  They do some work for commercial and governmental organizations.   Their clients include the ACLU, TCKTCKTCK, the Center for Democracy and Technolgy,  the New York State Senate, and Young People For.   Adam has also been doing pro bono work for KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program).

Advomatic is an example of a “virtual company”.  That is, most of the employees participate in there work day using tools that operate over the Internet.  A typical arrangement is a client to connect to Advomatic’s IRC chat room, a web browser opened to their project management system (sometimes referred to as the ticketing system) , and of course any tools the developer is using to program, design, or manage projects.  Advomatic’s developers and themers are located all over the country and the world including New York New York, Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Santa Fe New Mexico, Reno Nevada, and Hong Kong China.

Advomatic uses Drupal an open source content management system supported by a large community of developers.  Drupal is LAMP based, with thousands of contributed modules,  and has straight forward access to creating custom modules.

As a warning, the video interview was recorded while Adam was on vacation and in the background you may hear the sounds of cooking and children playing.

The interview is divided into sections each addressing a particular topic.  Particularly interesting in this interview are Adam’s description of Advomatic’s in house project management system (5:56) and the section on communicating with clients (12:44) where he talks a bit more about their project management system (14:48).  In these sections Adam says that Advomatic doesn’t use an Agile development process, but it is clear from how tightly coupled the client is to the project and how tasks are allocated that their process has many Agile characteristics.   In many ways their development process is more Agile than many companies that claim to use Agile development.

Other areas you might find interesting are the section on Creativity in Software Development (20:45) and As a High School Student (25:35).

Below is list of the time stamps of each section of the interview.

  • Before Advomatic ———————————————- 0:18
  • Advomatic Startup ——————————————— 1:49
  • Advomatic Grows ————————————————2:45
  • A Virtual Company?  —————————————— 3:56
  • Developer Workstyles —————————————- 5:07
  • Project Management System —————————— 5:56
  • Biggest Coop —————————————————– 8:39
  • When Projects Go Wrong ———————————- 11:40
  • Communicating with Clients  —————————— 12:44
  • Estimating Costs ———————————————— 15:07
  • Working Virtually ———————————————— 15:53
  • Managing Software Developers ————————— 16:45
  • What got you started in software Development – 17:44
  • What is Software Development —————————-19:56
  • Creativity in Software Development ———————-20:45
  • Become a Software Developer if… ———————— 24:30
  • As a High School Student ———————————— 25:35