1. Where did the idea for this application come from and why did you do it?

One of our employees (Joosep Lall) used to train and compete at table tennis events. He found that visiting the official homepage of Estonian table tennis from his mobile device was not always the most convenient way – often the tournaments took place at locations without accessible internet connection and therefore it was not possible to look at the ratings of your upcoming opponents. So as we had just created the company, it seemed like a great opportunity to introduce ourselves, showcase our skills and develop something from scratch that we could add to our portfolio.

We chose to develop an Android app instead of a website, because we were looking for something more challenging and we wanted to demonstrate that we have the skill for creating good looking Android applications. We knew that there would at least be few people that are interested in it.

2. How did the development progress?

Overall the development went very smoothly. The challenging part was building a system where the mobile application does not depend entirely on the lauatennis.ee webpage. With this in mind, we added one additional layer between the application and the website. The job of this layer was to act as a buffer that made sure the Android app would still be running if the website was temporarily offline. In addition, it avoids unnecessary load to the lauatennis.ee web page. With the buffer in place the Android app just had to display the information that had already been processed. Network connectivity issues were also gone as the application saves the latest received data, so before a competition one can open the app once and let it cache all the data and then look at it during the competition without a data connection.

3. Does it currently support only Android devices?

There is just the Android app for now. With funding it is possible in the future to develop for other platforms as well.

4. Are you expecting feedback from end-users? If so, what kind of feedback?

We look forward to getting feedback that would help us along. We wish for the application to get more users and for current users to be satisfied with the experience. Certainly, we want to know what people already enjoy and what could be done better. We also welcome new ideas that the application could benefit from.

5. What kind of features are you planning to add?

We see huge potential here that could really add something to the table tennis community. Some of the things we thought about:

• Highlighting yourself or your friends and teammates in the ratings. We thought it would be really cool to see this instant comparison of how the ratings are changing in time.
• Graphically displaying the changes in ratings. When a person has risen or fallen in the ratings then one could immediately see that in front of the person’s name (some small icon). Perhaps even a ratings history where it would be possible to see someone climb the rankings.
• Improvement of calendar data – Adding precise locations that allow navigation to the competition area and contact information of the referees for that competition.
• Linking with social media accounts.

As the current application was developed on our own cost and time, we don’t have more resources for further development. If, however, we get support from the Estonian Table Tennis Association or the table tennis community, then we would happily like to continue on with this project.

6. What kind of company is Devbreak?

Our main area of focus is developing IT-systems and applications, such as full solution web portals (business logic with visual side), Android apps, desktop apps, etc. We usually also accept smaller projects like websites and e-stores, so let us know when you need something. All necessary info is on our homepage www.devbreak.ee.

The post Devbreak featured in an interview with Estonian Table Tennis Association appeared first on devbreak.

It was probably exactly the same as it has been for thousands of other companies –  a few guys came together with an idea to combine their strengths and huge variety of skills to earn some extra money. Before doing all that there were few steps we had to take.

Purpose of the company

This part was not difficult at all. We all already knew what we wanted to do – application development and consulting. The first rule we agreed to was that working has to be fun. That meant we could decide which projects to accept and which ones to reject. It is no secret that you do an excellent job if you actually like what you are doing – you put a piece of yourself into the project and really care about your “pet”. I’m sure all our clients will appreciate this. The first rule led us to the second one – preferring general development over regular web/homepages.We like to do both, but custom built solutions, tailored for each customer,  bring more excitement and more individual growth to each member of the company.

Name of the company

Choosing a name took approximately 3-4 hours. All those lovely names we came up were already taken or were too similar to others. We even tried a random name generator without luck. Still, we got a good laugh with that. So, we wanted something meaningful. Surely names like “High Hopes” described very well how we feel about our company, but those are more suitable for other fields, perhaps for a religious e-shop or a cannabis dispensary. Next, for a moment, we thought we liked the idea of inserting our national identity to our company name. We tried to combine words like “code” and “Estonia”, which got us many options like CodEst, BestEst etc. We realised the word “code” should be replaced with “development” because we do more than just writing code. Still, not all of us were satisfied. Finally, we started taking nouns and combining them with the word “dev”. That is how “devbreak” was born from the phrase “daybreak”. How we see it, “devbreak” does not mean to take a break from development, but rather it is the exact moment when something wonderful starts. Like a coffee-break that everyone loves.

Logo

What pure joy this was. We opened a logo contest in freelancer.com for almost the minimum prize amount. Our contest description was very short, something like: “The required logo must look simple but elegant, no bright colors etc”. It did not take long for the results to start coming in, the first one was posted within minutes and they kept coming. Here are just a few examples:

Number 1

That was the first logo. It was probably generated by some stamp example engine like many others we got but we were almost in love with that already.

Number 2

That one we did not like – too bright, too sparse. It is polite to leave a comment to the designer. So we did that. Ohh, boy, we just encouraged him. He started to post the same logo with many color variations. That was not our intention at all.

Number 3

If we had a special price only for the idea, then this logo would win that. Unfortunately, not all potential clients know the html break tag. That logo would have been too cryptic. But yeah, the idea was extremely good for us, IT people.

Number 4

Only for a comic book cover not for a decent dev company.

Number 5

Can you read out the name of the company here? Is it DEV or DEN something?

Number 6

At first it looked very nice, but after looking at it for a while I couldn’t get away from the feeling that the DB part displays a face of a cartoon animal. Just rotate it -90° and you see eyes and a big open mouth. That made me want to reject all logos where DB was pictured.

Number 7

These two were more suitable for a company that deals with doors or windows.

Number 8

We rejected all logos where the characters “d” and “b” were together. That result resembled something inappropriate. In one design these  letters were even connected with a top curve. It was so obvious and awful that we cannot display it here, sorry.

Number 9

This was our second choice. It looked smooth and a little bit rubber-like, making you want to swipe your hand over the design and feel it. Definitely the background here played a huge role.

Number 10 – THE WINNER

Very simple but elegant. It catches the eye but at the same time doesn’t scream “Look at me!”. A Logo should be more like an additional nice element, not the most important thing on documents or webpages. The vertical line in the middle also symbolizes a natural break.

We really enjoyed selecting out the best result. We did not expect to get such a huge variety of designs, especially as the price was so low. Yes, it was a hard selection, but at the same time it was entertaining. Half of these logos really made us laugh.

Registering a company

It is very easy to register a company in Estonia. In theory, it takes only a couple of minutes to fill in an online application and voila, it is done. In practice it took a little bit longer until we got to that point, as we first had to decide who will be a CEO, if  we should pay the deposit now or should we leave it for the next year etc. The bureaucracy part is no fun.

So, you may wonder how much we had to pay for all of that. The total cost of starting the company was 250€ which included logo, registration, domain and some other small things. Not bad at all
Check back soon for more blog updates!

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