From Madison, Wisconsin Drifty Co's Ben Sperry and Max Lynch Build Mockup Tools to Write Code So You Don't Have To
To start the week we're please to chat with co-founders, Max Lynch & Ben Sperry from Drifty Co in Madison, Wisconsin. Both from Milwaukee, these two were able to combine their web skills and solve problems people face every day.
Right up our alley is tooling for HTML5 websites. We're always looking for the best tools to save time and energy while expressing our creativity through HTML and CSS.
We chat about our experiences with these tools in the past. Bigger tools like Dreamweaver from Adobe tend to be burdensome while smaller tools like Basalmiq don't output usable code.
Ben tells us how they solved their own problem by creating Codiqa, a drag and drop interface to build jquery mobile website and apps.
Jetstrap is the second product offered from Drifty and already has 80,000 people using it. The tool brings drag and drop interface building to Twitter Bootstrap, making it faster and easier to turn ideas into reality.
We ask where Drifty has found success with content marketing, seeing they have such a loved product for designers and developers. They tell us what really counts is when their customers share their stories with them. The Drifty blog is great and there's some great thoughts on startup culture on Max's blog. The valuable content and an honest approach have reached the hacker news and reddit audience.
Contributing to the open source community helps, and embracing the best tools and communities like Twitter Bootstrap and Jquery Mobile.
We get a little geeky and chat about the state of javascript libraries like backbone, angular, and other hot data binding goodness.
Backend server tools might be the next target for Drifty. Theming is another daily pain point they are looking at. We start to imagine where the Drifty product roadmap will evolve around the existing tools as building blocks.
Education and teaching web development has been very successful at bringing inbound marketing. Blog posts about getting stuff done in backbone.js has been very popular. And open source tools like Graphite have been helpful to lots of people who end up finding out about Codiqa.
Jeff wants to hear what else is hot for web dev's, and we chat about the trend of moving apps toward the client and simplifying the server presence. The landscape is still pretty wild, and lots of people are just building their own REST API's, instead of getting burned by the recent Parse acquisition. Firebase is mentioned as a tool offering a high grade real-time platform. Another technology coming out of Madison is CDN Connect, which automates making your images responsive.
Ben and Max spent three months in Texas as part of the Tech Stars startup program. While there, they met mentors who could offer useful advice. They were able to learn from the success these mentors had in the field a decade ago.
Drifty is growing and looking for javascript hackers to help them make the web better for the rest of us. If you're a js dev, it's worth a look because there's a solid foundation and culture at Drifty!
Right up our alley is tooling for HTML5 websites. We're always looking for the best tools to save time and energy while expressing our creativity through HTML and CSS.
We chat about our experiences with these tools in the past. Bigger tools like Dreamweaver from Adobe tend to be burdensome while smaller tools like Basalmiq don't output usable code.
Ben tells us how they solved their own problem by creating Codiqa, a drag and drop interface to build jquery mobile website and apps.
Jetstrap is the second product offered from Drifty and already has 80,000 people using it. The tool brings drag and drop interface building to Twitter Bootstrap, making it faster and easier to turn ideas into reality.
We ask where Drifty has found success with content marketing, seeing they have such a loved product for designers and developers. They tell us what really counts is when their customers share their stories with them. The Drifty blog is great and there's some great thoughts on startup culture on Max's blog. The valuable content and an honest approach have reached the hacker news and reddit audience.
Contributing to the open source community helps, and embracing the best tools and communities like Twitter Bootstrap and Jquery Mobile.
We get a little geeky and chat about the state of javascript libraries like backbone, angular, and other hot data binding goodness.
Backend server tools might be the next target for Drifty. Theming is another daily pain point they are looking at. We start to imagine where the Drifty product roadmap will evolve around the existing tools as building blocks.
Education and teaching web development has been very successful at bringing inbound marketing. Blog posts about getting stuff done in backbone.js has been very popular. And open source tools like Graphite have been helpful to lots of people who end up finding out about Codiqa.
Jeff wants to hear what else is hot for web dev's, and we chat about the trend of moving apps toward the client and simplifying the server presence. The landscape is still pretty wild, and lots of people are just building their own REST API's, instead of getting burned by the recent Parse acquisition. Firebase is mentioned as a tool offering a high grade real-time platform. Another technology coming out of Madison is CDN Connect, which automates making your images responsive.
Ben and Max spent three months in Texas as part of the Tech Stars startup program. While there, they met mentors who could offer useful advice. They were able to learn from the success these mentors had in the field a decade ago.
Drifty is growing and looking for javascript hackers to help them make the web better for the rest of us. If you're a js dev, it's worth a look because there's a solid foundation and culture at Drifty!