Estimating with uncertainty!

Planning, forecasting or estimating software projects in the face of uncertainty never felt comfortable to me. We're given unclear requirements and asked to give precise estimates. Often we do that in spreadsheets with individual estimates per task with a single summed value at the end. We lose the sense of uncertainty and give our clients the false sense of security with a single precise number.

Read more…

Employee Benefits at RokkinCat

RokkinCat recently hired a couple new people! While discussing benefits we were given the feedback: "You should do a better job advertising that." So in the spirit of sharing how we run, we're happy to share our current list of benefits. You may…

Read more…

Guesstimate Anything

Guess Anything for Fun and Profit Estimation is very hard. More often than not we'll do some simple extrapolation or "gut feels" and multiply by a known number. Sometimes we'll get more technical with a spreadsheet. We will do some averaging and…

Read more…

What even is a Hack & Tell?

Finding the time to work on a personal project can be difficult. We all have busy lives, family, friends and the last thing we want to do is spend a weekend sitting alone staring at our computers. A Hack & Tell is a full day where you get to work on…

Read more…

7 reasons why you should come to the next RokkinCat Hack'n Tell

Our next Hack'n Tell is coming up on October 22nd, register now for tickets, if you are skeptical about it read on! 1. The Food burrito RokkinCat provides glorious Chipotle burritos. As well as coffee, pastries, soda, sparkling and still water! Free…

Read more…

Monitoring your Elixir Application on Heroku with Librato

One of the most powerful parts of the BEAM ecosystem is that many of the libraries come with industrial tooling and ways to connect. Erlang and by proxy Elixir comes with powerful tools for visualizing processess, messages and mailboxes(queues…

Read more…

Milwaukee Slack Chatroom

Milwaukee has a communication problem. It is amazingly difficult in such a modern era to bust out of your bubble and see what everyone else in the city is doing. We all have our own circle of friends, business partners, and acquaintances but it is…

Read more…

JSON Views in Phoenix

Lately there has been discussion around rendering Ecto models for a JSON style API in Phoenix. I am part of the core Phoenix team, and I typically use Phoenix to build API's. I am here to show you an example of using views to render JSON. Right now…

Read more…