Author's words of wisdom

Our clients often try to push us to hire freelancers and remote developers to expand the team. Sometimes we agree, but more often – we actively resist the suggestion 🙂 This article will help us to understand various schemes of remote development and determine which schemes are efficient for different types of projects.


The first step is to define the terms. If we talk about physical location of employees and degree of their involvement in a project, there are two basic dichotomies: Contract vs Staff Employee and Office vs Remote Work.


Remote dihotomy

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We’re often asked how much it costs to make a Trading Desk system. We literally just the other day received this letter:
“…I must know how much it costs to develop a complete Agency Trading Desk, even just a ballpark figure… It would be a big help if you could give me an approximate cost…”

When you start developing what our correspondents imply by an Agency Trading Desk (ATD), it turns out that their understandings differ.

We have several ATDs at various stages of development. Before starting development, we looked at quite a few commercial systems. “Looked at” isn’t the best word, but maybe evaluate; by this we mean our analysts combed the length and breadth of functions and conducted a detailed analysis of the fundamental features.

We’ll soon be placing a description of several systems here. We will start with TheTradeDesk and Cappture. These choices may seems somewhat strange. TheTradeDesk is without a doubt the leader in its field; it’s a full DSP with a very richly functional ATD, especially in terms of RTB purchasing. Cappture is a new and, at the moment, fairly unknown system. As it turned out, one of our Japanese clients, a digital agency representative, uses exactly these systems and wanted to create several hybrid functions in their own ATD system.
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A couple of months ago we started experimenting with Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a compact and very simple program with which to build wire-frame models of user interfaces. By way of example, below is one of the screens that we have drawn using it in Russian.

Sample Balsamiq mock-up

When we started to experiment with Balsamiq I could not have imagined how much this program would affect our development process and how many radical changes it would bring.
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