How We Do It

iPhone SDK

Genesis of Genius

Awesome software developers can be Lone Wolves. Mocra became our den, our muse and our source of genius. In turn, we become code machines churning out the best solutions to the hardest problems. Hence, Mocra is the premier consultancy for Ruby on Rails, iPhone and Cocoa development.

Yet Mocra is not a black box. As a client, you don't email your requirements and have solutions magically appear a few weeks later. Our transparency and internal innovations are as critical to success as the individuals themselves.

If you know how we work then you'll know if you can work with us to make something wonderful! This page is a window into the world of Mocra.

"I am very fortunate to have found Dr Nic... He is incredibly smart and in a world of technical developers that deliberately try to baffle clients with BS, he just assumes that I won't understand a word of technical jargon, talks English and then proceeds to deliver incredible results." Adam Lindemann, CEO/Founder, Imindi, TechCrunch 50 2008 finalist

Developers Developers Developers

Successfully hiring the best developers is critical. We don't interview anyone. We constantly research the developer community and select individuals we'd like to invite. They fly into our office in Brisbane, Australia and hang out with us for a few days to a week; like speed dating! Except slower. We learn what it's like to work with them, they learn what its like to live with us. It works brilliantly.

A Client's Life with Mocra

Working with Mocra has been a fun and rewarding experience. They are committed, self-reliant, and are always keen to learn when new challenges arise. They work well with little supervision ... that makes it much easier to sleep at night. Andy Wright, CEO,
Elevensoft, creator of Orchestrate

Tools

Each development and production tool we use we are infatuated with. When a new developer or non-developer joins Mocra they are indoctrinated into using our preferred suite of tools.

The indoctrination process is often informal. One developer will scream with delight "Oh I love Skitch soo soo much" and the new staff will enquire "What is Skitch?" and they will promptly be given the "Oh you will love Skitch so much" tour of the software.

In many cases, we wrote our own favourite tools: command line apps, TextMate bundles, web apps, Cocoa UIs, etc. We keep optimising our development and administration processes every day.

"Makes some of the best programming tools you'll ever use. Peter Jackson [comment on WorkingWithRails]"

The tools we love (mouse over for our descriptions):

Truly many of these tools increased our happiness and productivity by orders of magnitude over whatever came before them.

Open Source Philosophy

Within all our projects — Ruby on Rails, iPhone and Cocoa — we use a lot of Open Source projects. More significantly, the staff at Mocra create a lot of Open Source projects.

We have authored or maintained over 50 Open Source projects in the last few years. These include Ruby on Rails plugins, RubyGems, Cocoa/iPhone libraries, TextMate bundles, etc.

"Admire this about @drnic: when he wants something, he builds it." Pat Nakajima on twitter

We've even Open Sourced full applications, such as rBoard (forum system in Rails) and iConMerge (merge icons in Cocoa)