Rubius Company

The sixth edition of DevPRO, the annual conference of professional developers and IT specialists, took place in Tomsk on May 12. The conference was organized by software development company Rubius, in collaboration with Tomsk State University, IIDF and the Tomsk branch of Google Developer Groups. DevPRO’18 attracted 700 IT specialists from 150 Russian and international companies, twice as many as last year. Conference attendees came from 16 cities across France, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States and Ukraine.

The conference was held at a new location: the modern building that houses the Institute of Economics and Management of TSU. Among the international companies with speakers at the conference were IBM Watson (France), Logistics Pro (USA), Bija Company (USA), Evolution Gaming (Netherlands) and DevExpress (Netherlands). Russian companies represented at the event included Avito, Alfa-Bank, SimbirSoft and HeadHunter. Business consultant Mark S A Smith (USA) opened the conference with a powerful speech on technology marketing and what the future holds for today’s IT companies.

Presentations at the conference were divided into five categories: Trends, was dedicated to AI and blockchain technology; Web, covering to web app development; Enterprise, devoted to high-load systems and test-driven development; Management, on productivity and team management; and Mix, which covered interfacing, software testing automation and the tools of successful IT entrepreneurs. Also included in the conference was a roundtable meeting with leaders of Tomsk IT companies, who discussed recruiting policies and human resources management “from the inside” and spoke on what employers will expect from future employees.

Rubius’s Pavel Haustov was voted the best speaker of this year’s DevPRO. He spoke on how to create a powerful neural network-based AI, able to learn on its own how to beat the computer in Mortal Kombat on the game’s hardest difficulty setting.

At the IT companies’ exhibition, participants tested their IT knowledge in a quiz with Plesk’s Telegram bot, solved simple logical puzzles with Sidenis, raced with SibEDGE, talked to Rubius’s robotic IT bear, and examined the projects from young inventors from Digital Technology school.

During breaks, participants socialized, competed in Mindflex Duel, rode hoverboard and waveboard, and took photos with the conference’s mascot, Sasha the Developer.

As DevPRO’18 came to a close, there was a prize drawing, with prizes including an electric kick scooter from Space-O Technologies; valuable gifts from Center of Financial Technologies (CFT), Sidenis and Aspirity; and licenses from Parallels and JetBrains. An informal part of the conference took place at the Ethno bar and restaurant, where attendees and speakers discussed the conference results together and sang their favorite karaoke songs.

Next year, Rubius is planning to put on an even bigger conference: two days instead of one, more well-known speakers and hotter topics.

Planyway is going to Silicon Valley! We made it to the finals of Global Pitch Russia. This unique event created by Sberbank, IIDF and Fort Ross Ventures supports Russian IT startups. Out of 260 applications, the experts selected only 22 with the potential to grow in the American market. In June, we are going to the USA to meet top Silicon Valley investors.

Planyway already has users in 190 countries. 20% of them are from the USA, 10% are from Brazil and 8% are from the UK. We hope that assessments and recommendations from global experts will help us make further progress in conquering foreign markets.

At the Startup Sauna accelerator program in Finland, we called the Tomsk team every day. To do so, we used special booths that allow a user to work without distractions.

We thought that a booth like that might come in handy in our office. Failing to find anything like it in Russia, we decided to make one ourselves.

Several months later, after various designers and engineers finished their work, we finally received our booth, which we call Qubius. It is a comfortable space for calling a client, focusing on your work or simply resting in silence.

The Qubius design was such a success that we’re now launching mass production of the booth in preparation for selling it in Europe and the USA.

On March 15, Rubius opened a representative office in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The new office will support existing clients and promote software development services in the Kazakh market.

 “We have been working on joint projects with Kazakh companies for a long time,” said Sergey Koshevoy, CEO of Rubius. “For example, KAZ Minerals is one of our key clients for Rubius Project Manager. We hope that the representative office will further strengthen our cooperation”.

Moreover, Rubius will take part in the Digital Kazakhstan program and join Astana Hub, an initiative to create a “technology park” of international IT startups. Digital Kazakhstan is a state program to encourage economic development in the Republic of Kazakhstan for the 2018–2022 period. The program will provide a powerful impetus for technological modernization of the economy while raising the standard of living in the country.

The Rubius team won the grand prize at the Open Innovations Startup Tour in Krasnoyarsk. Experts there selected the 30 most interesting products out of 119 applications, three of which were ours – Planyway, Qubius and Edustrator.

Planyway took first place in the IT category, and went on to win the competition-wide final. Representing the Planyway team, Sergey Dorofeev took home the grand prize of 300,000 rubles, plus an invitation and flight to the semifinals of the Startup Village competition. Kirill Kaem, senior vice president of innovation at the Skolkovo Foundation, said that Planyway is a product “made to Silicon Valley standards”.

Qubius, our new office booth for phone calls and conversations, took second place in the Industrial category. It was represented by Egor Vodnev, who received an invitation to the Start SUV finals and Startup Village semifinals.

Edustrator, a web service for administration of educational institutions, was awarded a special prize. Maria Dorofeeva, its founder, was invited to the IIDF part-time accelerator program.

As a result, we had three days packed full of meetings with investors and experts from Skolkovo, interesting startuppers from all over Siberia, representatives from Krasnoyarsk industrial enterprises and, of course, pitches – a lot of pitches!

“A recipe for success is a team. Sergey Koshevoy, Planyway’s creator, had an amazing idea. Our programmers and designers helped him to bring it to life. Our marketing team leveled up the product and helped to prepare the presentation (we’d been working until 3 A.M. on pitch day). What’s important at a startup is people. Then, the idea and the product itself. Then – and only then – money,” explained Sergey Dorofeev in an interview with Startup Tour.

In 2017, Rubius’s turnover grew by 40%, with the proportion of foreign projects at 52%. The average pay increased by 10% – a nice bonus to the household budgets of Rubius employees.

Geography. We opened a comfortable, new development office in central St. Petersburg and got closer to our partners in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Europe and the United States. We traveled to clients in the US, South Korea, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland and Kazakhstan. Here in Tomsk, we also received guests from Italy, the US and Finland. All in all, Rubius took part in more than 30 industry events around the world!

Our products. The sales of our own products increased by 32% compared to 2016: 444 licenses to new customers were sold. Rubius DrEAM has been registered in the National Software Registry at the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation. We released a new product called Planyway – a calendar and timeline for Trello. It’s already gained more than 65,000 users from 190 countries! Planyway was named the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, one of the largest sites for startups. Rubius Project Manager (RPM) took first place in the “Best Project Management System” rankings in Russia. The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration included RPM and Planyway in its list of modern IT solutions for effective management. Students of the Academy will learn about these tools. This year, we went through accelerator programs at Startup Sauna (Helsinki), the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (Moscow), StartupLab and Unicorn (Tomsk). In addition, we’ve developed two new products (that are secret, for now) that are already in closed beta testing… Keep an eye out for announcements in 2018!

Office and bonuses. Our office now has an area of over 1000 sq. m. It’s not only larger, but more comfortable: we have new wooden tables, a big coffee machine, a hoverboard, a waveboard, and bicycles. We’re saving time: you can take a yoga class, get a massage, or get your hair cut without ever leaving the office. We even have a rec room with table tennis and air hockey table. For their good work in 2017, all our employees received a nice pre-new year bonus, as well as voluntary health insurance policies with 300,000 RUB of coverage. We’re happy to take good care of our employees’ health!

Education. We held DevPRO the largest developer conference in Tomsk. This year, it was visited by almost 500 people from 122 companies in Tomsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk. For the first time, we also held a DevPRO conference in Krasnoyarsk (together with D2D), which had more than 300 participants. We continue to support programming contests in Tomsk financially and logistically, as well as conducting technology seminars and teaching at Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk State University and Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics. Together with Ernst & Young, we ran a business school for economics students at Tomsk State University. We were included in regional and federal councils on the development of entrepreneurship and human capital; the first of our proposed initiatives will see the light of day as soon as next year.

Rubius Academy. More than 230 people are studying English and German at Rubius Academy; 55 of them are children. Sidenis, Stels, and Promotion became new clients of ours. Our teachers have received University of Cambridge certificates, giving them the right to teach in any country in the world.

We’d like to thank our clients and partners for their trust, interest in our products, and pleasant working relationships. With 2018 just days away, we wish you all a very happy new year!

On December 21, shortly before voting ended, browser extension Planyway managed to pull ahead of Facebook’s Facial Recognition tool and 22 other products from American and European companies. Planyway extends the functionality of Trello, the popular project management application with about 25 million users worldwide. It can also sync with Google, Outlook and Apple calendars. Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt and serial entrepreneur, tweeted about Planyway the following day.

“Launching Planyway on Product Hunt showed that our product is needed, and that many people like it. The number of unique visitors to the Planyway website tripled in just one day,” said project manager Sergey Koshevoy of Rubius, the company that develops the extension. As of December 26, 929 people have given Planyway their votes.

Planyway already has 65,000 users in 190 countries, with companies like Siemens, Intel, Uber, Google, Netflix and Stanford University among its clients. According to an estimate from Russian business news portal vc.ru, Product Hunt’s readership amounted to one million people by the end of the year.

The new office will be creating BIM solutions for design and construction, virtual and augmented reality products, as well as mobile and web applications. Its first customers are companies in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Europe and the USA. The opening of the new office will allow Rubius to strengthen cooperation with our current strategic partners, including ASCON, LO CNITI, CDSK and other Russian and foreign clients.

Rubius developers in St. Petersburg have already begun creating a server for retail chains in New York, as well as a program module to optimize BIM models for 3D printers ordered by a Finnish company. Moreover, Rubius – together with longstanding Russian partner LO CNITI – has launched a new project based on augmented reality technology.

At the opening of the new office, LO CNITI director Andrey Lovygin said, “Together with Rubius, we are developing a mobile client to search for and identify equipment, based on augmented reality technology. It will help manage equipment repair and maintenance while monitoring process effectiveness within the company. Rubius has proven its ability to solve high-level technical tasks on more than one occasion, and I am sure this project won’t be an exception. In addition to that, we can start working on projects in the fields of machine learning and big data analytics.”

Geographic growth will allow Rubius to launch new projects with Renga Software, a joint venture of ASCON and 1C that deals with software development for building design with the use of BIM technologies.

“Now, with the time zone difference out of our way, our cooperation will be much easier,” said Yevgeny Shyvalov, CEO of Renga Software. “Following our customers’ requests, with the help of Rubius we can start working on applicable, field-specific solutions on the basis of Renga.”

Rubius’s office in St. Petersburg is its second one in Russia. Rubius also has representative offices in Moscow and New York.

Each year for good reasons smartwatches become more popular. According to the Strategy Analysis agency, 22 million were sold during the first quarter of 2017 up 4 million from 2016. Each global giant Apple, Sony, Samsung, Fitbit is working on its piece of the smartwatch solution.

Rubius, the Tomsk IT group, after in-depth assessment, feedback and experience from the market, developed the secure industrial smartwatch solution. Rubius with LO CNITI in 2015 released the first application of its kind for Apple Watch to monitor CNC machines. At the same time Rubius completed several projects for large industrial enterprises where smartwatch technology was applied. These two events were the main catalysts that fussed into our solid secure smartwatch.

Rubius CTO Anton Kudinov says: “The attempts to use mobile technology for production tasks have been made long before. However, smartphones and tablets are not the best options for it. As a rule, a worker employed in production needs both hands to do his job: he cannot hold his gadget, let alone type something or operate it somehow. Smartwatch is handier in this case: it displays the necessary information, notifies, contacts the control center, and so on.”

The majority of the smartwatches focus on everyday life management apps such as alarm clock, messenger, physical activity, etc., and these applications come installed, which is great for life use. However, they are a needless drain on the power for the work environment so for a client it means that the final cost of the device will be unreasonably higher. Also, to use smartwatches for specific purposes, for example, at military sites, Rubius has to make sure that there are no bookmarks, any prohibited base elements, or ways to transfer data via unsecure communication channels (as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth). The company can only guarantee this with its own product but as a benefit the final cost for clients is considerably lower with Rubius Smartwatch.

Rubius smartwatches use functionality and technology that keeps it technically ahead of the leading brands. It is designed to track location of staff on industrial enterprise grounds and monitor their actions. The main watch feature is a combination of several technologies (for example, NFC and iBeacon) and know-how yet to be disclosed.

Rubius developer Anton Vaytulevich points out: “The combination of two technologies – NFC and iBeacon – helps to monitor where a specialist is and was, what operations he performed, and whether or not they were correct. At a facility, either iBeacon or NFC can be used depending on the goals of the control center. NFC helps to track location within the accuracy of 30 centimeters (otherwise 6 inches). A staff member only needs to bring the watch up to the equipment or tool with a NFC tag and after that an operator is notified about this. The cost of NFC tags are quite low so you can place and use an infinite amount of them.”

iBeacon is used when you need to know the total number of staff present at a facility and locate each person within an accuracy of 3 meters (10 feet). The gist of it is there are special beacons placed around the facility. When a watch gets within the beacon range the control center receives data about the watch’s owner location.

Technologies used in the smartwatch and its unique software allows it to deal with a variety of additional needs that the user can elect to use. Rubius developers added to their watches a heart rate monitor and other matrices to control the emotional state and physical activity of staff members. This function is highly used in the area of passenger transportation to monitor the driver or pilot state of being as well as hazardous production areas or military sites.

Anton Kudinov adds: “Smartwatches increase the level of work safety within an enterprise. In case of emergency, during a fire, for example, they help locate any person and check his status, as well as to make sure that everyone is evacuated.”

In the last few months, the Military gave high marks to the most recent Rubius prototype and are in the process of purchasing them in volume from Rubius with completion of the product data sheets and integrated testing under real-life conditions which are planned in late 2017 – early 2018.

At the IX International Forum ATOMEXPO 2017, Rubius company together with the Siberian Chemical Combine presented a 3D application for chemical production lines. The application mixes reality with the smartglasses Microsoft HoloLens.

Once inside a room, the user puts on the glasses and sees the real settings and objects around him. Then the application adds a full-sized 3D model of the production line combining the digital image with the real world. Users can check whether the equipment fits the room, and examine its configuration and technical specifications. The application can visualize models from: KOMPAS-3D, AutoCAD, SolidWorks and other well-known CAD tools.

“Mixed reality completes the classic approach to production design. Designers can see all the elements of the production line, as well as join, arrange and move things around. It prevents possible designing and equipment placement issues, and helps bring a project to the client and facilitates approval faster,” Rubius Chief Technology Officer Anton Kudinov says.

The application was demonstrated to the Director General of the State Corporation “Rosatom” Alexey Likhachev, the President of the fuel company “TVEL” Yury Olenin, the Rector of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI Mikhail Strikhanov, and the Vice-President for SNF and RW of ASE Group of Companies Grigory Sosnin.

Whats more, the application can be used for training staff on how to properly use the equipment before it’s assembled, as well as for demonstrations of operations sequence during the repair and maintenance processes. Specialists can view the inner working of the equipment, assemble and disassemble it according to the maintenance requirements. Smartglasses combined with the Rubius application reduces costly errors made during assembly of equipment, in both the factory and field.

Rubius released Google Chrome extension allowing you to use Trello as your week planner.

It has interface like Google Calendar but you can manage your schedule right on the Trello board. You can drag cards to the calendar to specify time or create a new one right here. All cards with due dates will be shown on the calendar.

At the top of the calendar you can create all-day or multi-day events. It allows you to plan longtime tasks and display your project timeline. Event takes the card label color. Also, you can display the archived cards to view the history of accomplished tasks.

If you want to use Trello not only as task lists but for planning your time as well, Planyway extension will be a real find for you.

Each New Year we take stock and make plans. In 2016 it was not so easy for Russian businesses due to the intensified sanctions and a general decline in the economy. Despite this, Rubius Company showed strong growth in all areas.

Main results for 2016. Rubius increased its revenue by 25.5%. The staff grew to 100+ people, including 10 PhDs in Engineering Science, which indirectly shows a higher intellectual level of ongoing projects. The average annual salary increased by 22% that allows us to attract more qualified and efficient professionals.

Abroad. The share of foreign projects increased from 54% to 65%.  Teams of Rubius programmers visited South Korea, Germany, and the United States, where they implemented complicated projects at Сustomers’ workplaces. This year we also hosted programmers from the United States to share their experiences in the development of joint projects.

Our products. Rubius own products sales increased by 17.5%. In 2016 we attracted 32 corporate clients including one more distributor in Southeast Asia. We released a new product, Rubius DrEAM – an enterprise asset management system. Rubius Project Manager (RPM) became one of the standard packages in the Unified Register of Russian Software and is being implemented by state institutions. We made presentations at major specialized conferences: Project Management Institute, Downstream Russia, Virtual Reality Developers Conference (San Francisco), VIII International IT-Forum. Rubius joined the National Association of Software Developers “National Software” (alongside with 1C, ABBYY, ASCON).

Victories. Rubius was, rated first as the most interesting exporting Tomsk IT-companies by popular vote. Our team won the Hackathon “Open Data of Tomsk Region”. One of the Rubius developers became the 178-th on the list of best programmers in the world according to Codeforces and a Rubius designer took first place, out of 31 participants, in the Web Design UI Challenge. We are proud to have professionals of such a high level on our team.

Education. We conducted the largest yet Tomsk DevPRO Conference for developers together with Microsoft with 450 people participating. There was a meeting with 80 frontend developers of Tomsk JS. Many of our staff continue to teach at Tomsk technical universities (TPU, TSU, and TUSUR).

Rubius Language Center (RLC). More than 200 people from 12 companies study English, German and Spanish at RLC. We received our state license for educational activity, which allows us to issue state certificates. RLC teachers and trainers organize business games and workshops on conflict management techniques, public speaking and team management for employees of companies that have English language clients. This year three groups of children, up to 3 years old, started studying at RLC. Five new teachers two of which are native English speakers joined our team. More than 1,500 people watched our video about the secrets of doing business abroad within one month.

Office and new bonuses. The company now occupies two floors, it is just under 9000 ft². We created an open terrace with a swing off of the second floor. Our employees gather there for lunch in the summer, and in the winter they build SnowGeeks. We put in a new kitchen, lunch hall, climate control, storage room, etc. The Rubius team is environmentally conscious and recycles. We have extra crafts: one of our team made a really cool levitating logo. We now have a massage and nap room for the employees. The Company doubled its staff bonuses for sports and pays those who teach at universities and institutes. We gave a Christmas bonuses to all our full-time employees. We continue to strengthen family values: we gave extra pay to employees for the 2 weddings and 5 births this year.

Thanks to our customers, partners and employees together we have this fantastic cooperation and with our continuing goal to strengthen your business and products, Rubius looks forward to a new fruitful year.

Rubius developed a mobile application “OkeyCity” for Okey bonus system. The bonus system was created by Loymax and it brings together 13 of the largest retail chains in Tomsk. KFC restaurant chain, INTERSPAR supermarket chain, “Children’s World” store chain of children’s goods and others are among its clients.

Since September 2016 the application has been available on Google Play for all users of Android devices. The users can:

• Receive notification of promotional events and their venues
• Control bonus points replenishment and spending
• Track history and list of purchased goods
• Save time at store – make electronic a shopping list
• Combine data from multiple bonus cards

Previously to see any information you had to go to their site but now there is a more convenient app for your smartphone where you instantly receive notifications.

The application helps companies to:

• Increase sales – targeted customers are always aware of all promotional events at the store
• Strengthen the credibility of your business – transparent charging and spending scheme of bonuses makes the service open and honest

The application is developed based on today’s cross-platform technologies, which allow us to simultaneously create any application for Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices. This reduces development costs for all customers and the execution time of the project.

Rubius is 10 years old! From a small start-up in the basement of a building at TUSUR, we’ve grown to become an international company with our own products, serious customers and the coolest development team of more than 100 people – and that’s a cause for a celebration!

On the birthday of the company, the staff from all the offices – Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tomsk – gathered to commemorate the occasion at one the most popular recreation center. Sergey Dorofeev, Sergey Koshevoy, and Anton Kudinov spoke about the company’s plans for the future and new perks for the employees: Rubius now has a stylish electric scooter, a free taxi, a Yamaguchi YA-6000 Axiom massage chair and a few delicious treats in the kitchen. The employees, in return, presented the management with a Panasonic HC-V770 video camera.

Those who have been in the company for a year received warm, branded sweatshirts as a tradition. You can’t miss them in the streets!

Afterward, there were free activities for everyone who came, held on the river, under the sun, inside spacious gazebos with snacks and in a huge area for socialization and entertainment. On three courts, teams played bumper ball, volleyball and football. Brave men mastered rafting on the river, tried to saddle a horse and learned to walk again on jumping stilts. Outdoor shooting went on until the evening; in a large gazebo, there were board games and a Sony PlayStation 4. The festivities ended with a hot sauna and songs by the fire. It was the best corporate party in Rubius history!

In Tomsk, Rubius took part in EdCrunch, an international educational conference. The conference brought together about 800 people, including 150 leading Russian and foreign experts.

Five Rubius specialists were invited to serve as experts and moderators on panels dedicated to machine learning, digital technologies in education and occupations of the future. Together with other experts, they discussed the creation of effective learning environments and VR/AR applications in engineering education, and shared their experiences working with our partner, Tomsk State University. On the “Competencies of the 21st Century” panel, head of Rubius Academy Olga Maltseva spoke on how to create courses of advanced training with registration up to two months before their start dates, and what today’s IT specialists should be taught.

At the EdCrunchPark exhibition, we presented Ustrator, a web service for administration of educational institutions, and demonstrated augmented reality-assisted training using HoloLens. Anyone had a chance to try to work at our AR training ground and see the convenience of this technology.

The Tomsk IT community has reached two significant milestones: we officially opened GDG Tomsk (Google Developer Groups) and organized the largest meetup in Tomsk dedicated to machine learning and computer vision. Thanks to the meetup’s open format, we managed to gather 120 specialists and hear presentations from 6 speakers.

At the meetup, we discussed issues relating to named entity recognition and clustering, improving the accuracy of real estate valuations using satellite imagery analysis, use of current machine learning systems for travelers tracking, advanced algorithms for detection and face recognition, use of VR in preparing training materials and various projects we could work on together.

The problems addressed and the level of the discussions have shown that machine learning has been rapidly growing in Tomsk, and we have competent specialists who are ready to share their experience.

We would like to thank Enbisys, Econophysica, Technika dela, UNIGINE, Elecard and Tomsk Machine Learning community for their active role in the meetup, and Boiling Point Tomsk for the provided space and live webcast. Thanks to them, such meetups are now possible in Tomsk.

Rubius team is back from CodeFest conference in Novosibirsk.

Twenty-four guys left Tomsk and Moscow offices in search of new knowledge and experiences. We listened to presentations, and communicated to speakers and colleagues from other IT companies. It’s rewarding to know that trending technologies discussed at the conference – Vue.js, Xamarin, React Native, Realm and .NET Core – are technologies that Rubius already uses successfully in our production.

Carrying on a Rubius tradition, we dined at a nice café, shared our impressions with one another and celebrated the achievements of our colleagues who had earned Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer credentials just a few days before the conference.

Rubius analyst Yevgeny Miroshnichenko gave a talk at Boiling Point – Tomsk titled “Requirements engineering: how to understand the customer and not mess up the project”. He shared his experience on how to work with customers in order to draft the right requirements for a project and make it a success.

Together with the audience, he analyzed the examples of real project requirements and found inaccuracies in them. Yevgeny also recommended some standards, guidelines and resources for self-education.

170 people from 67 companies and universities registered for the seminar. Yevgeny also fielded the questions from the participants, on some topics such as how to build effective communication with customers and how to take into account all their interests.

New perk for Rubius employees: private medical insurance with 300,000 rubles in coverage. It includes examinations, tests, and treatment at Tomsk best clinics.

Here’s how we stay healthy at Rubius: we have a ping-pong table, pull-up bar, massage center, and bonuses for physical activity. Healthy employees are more proactive and creative in solving complex problems.

Stay healthy!

We want to get as many talented students as possible into IT. That is why we designed and constructed a huge world map out of 100 most advanced technologies in the industry. You can find it in a lecture hall of Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics (TUSUR).

Our entire team contributed to the map. We wanted to show that IT has no borders, and that globalized products can be created right here in Tomsk. What’s important is choosing the right tools for the job.

Thanks to Pavel Senchenko, Dean of the Faculty of Control Systems at TUSUR, for supporting this initiative!

Our beloved SnegoGeek got a true friend – a snow SnegoDog with a tablet in his chaps. In the mornings, making a cup of fragrant coffee, we feast our eyes with their easygoing look and smile automatically in return.

December 14 we held a meetup on ASP.NET Core in the “Boiling Point – Tomsk” – a modern framework for web applications. Leading developers of DP Labs team (Rubius subdivision) Artur Drobinskiy and Anton Finko shared their experience of its using in Enterprise and Startup projects. The guys told about the pros and cons of ASP.NET Core, cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Docker), competitors, alternatives and troubles that you can encounter when working with this framework.

More than 60 developers from 20 companies and universities came down. The participants actively asked questions which flew into the backroom discussions.

Some days ago we invited the students from TUSUR (Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics) to look around the company. They asked a great number of questions such as what technologies and tools we use, and what will be in trend in the nearest future. Some students even stayed to meet with our developers, designers and QA-engineers. One of them, Sergey Saprunov, told us that they were really impressed with how everything works in Rubius.

– To be honest, the event was exiting. We visited the office of one of the largest IT companies in Tomsk and saw its working environment (it is really awesome). They told us about the projects and specialists required to do the job. It would be great if they turned that event into the Career Day.

Rubius invites students for job training every year. Quite often some of them stay with Rubius team after it.

Sergey Dorofeev gave several speeches at the official opening of “Boiling Point” in Tomsk, a space for creative communications and brainstorming. Sergey shared his view on what Tomsk is missing to become an identifiable brand in the IT business world, as well as his experience in participating in Russian and European acceleration programs.

“Boiling Point” is a 600 square meter center designed to meet the latest global trends in the organization of creative space, where businessmen, experts, and students meet and work as one team.

Sergey donated the book called “Good to great” to the “Boiling Point” library, mostly because it had a significant impact on the management approach at Rubius during its early years. So we hope more people could find it useful.

When you are proud of the company you work in, you want to wear sweatshirts with its logo and drink only from branded mugs. And this year we tried something new – branded cars! Thanks to guys, they became the pioneers and brought our idea to life!

As most know, for several years Rubius has been working on the augmented reality so no great surprise when Sergey Dorofeev and Anton Kudinov were invited to talk at the World Festival of Youth and Students 2017 in Sochi about new educational approaches to engineering.

Sergey and Anton came equipped not to lecture but to let our future engineers experience real augmented solutions. With about 50,000 participants from 185 countries, Microsoft HoloLens were busy demonstrating Rubius leading solutions for designers, architectures, equipment repair as well as the virtual training grounds.

With many countries already investing $50+ billion in this method of education, Sergey and Anton with experts from British Higher School of Art & Design, TSU, TPU, Lektorium project and Zillion.net discussed the prospects of this new educational method in Russia with an unexpected conclusion. They all agreed that such things as online-training and augmented reality applications at less cost help students study better, quicker and give easier access to knowledge but it doesn’t develop the desired soft skills required by employers. Mentoring that traditional university preserves along with the synergy and encouragement that grows the minds from the interaction of talented students is still a very important role in the development of soft skills.

The Festival was abundant with professionals from different fields and countries, thousands of students, multi-faceted presentations, warm bright entertaining sites that welcomed everyone to Sochi.

Hope to see you there next year.

Our co-worker from DP Labs Anton Morozov did a great job at the conference DevFest Siberia 2017. He did more than just sitting and listening to presentations: he studied and put into practice his knowledge about Web Sockets, Web vulnerabilities, image steganography, encrypted disks, PGP signatures, Bitcoin blockchain, capturing Wi-Fi packets, Edgar Allan Poe cipher, Morse code, one-time pad encryption, Kasiski’s method and hacking CAPTCHA. More than this, Anton had to bypass the real lock with picklocks. Nothing illegal! All that was within Blacklight quest.

Only 15 most stouthearted players had gone to the end. They were awarded with books and IoT devices. Anton and one other participant from Tomsk were named the winners in a number of independently completed tasks and contributed to the overall progress. They got a Grove Starter Kit Plus, a modular electronic platform for quick prototyping, from DEF CON 25 Hacking Conference in Las Vegas.

Anton, we are so proud of you, You Rock!

Last weekend twelve of us from Rubius attended the conference DevFest Siberia 2017 hosted by Google Developer Group in Novosibirsk. This event gave us a chance to acquire new knowledge, discuss a lot of crucial issues and we just had a lovely time.

For two days we listened to 30 amazing presentations, visited informative workshops and got to know developers from other companies. Our colleague Anton Morozov participated in the thrilling quest Blacklight and won, receiving a special prize from the conference organizers.

Also, we visited Yandex office in Novosibirsk where there was a friendly chess tournament, we discussed Machine Learning trends and invited them to DevPRO’18. We passed the rest of the evening sharing our impressions and future plans in a fine restaurant.

This last Saturday, our tight knit company threw an exciting and active outdoors Family Day.

For us, Family Day is the day when our employees take their soulmates, children, and pets to spend time in the open fresh air of the Siberian countryside. Not a corporate event where every step you take is planned but refreshing time to gather together and do the simple things that we find funny.

We rented a recreational area not far from Tomsk and as an annual tradition Sergey Koshevoy made pilaf. To make sure that everyone got a plate full of his signature dish we found a gigantic 28-liter wok pan and it must have been blessed because the vast number of people that came back for seconds were not turned away.

While Sergey was sweating over the hot flames, people busied themselves by setting the table, others ran off to play volleyball, badminton or football. Children were biking here and there, running across the woods and looking for mushrooms, and some of them started roasting marshmallows over the campfire before lunch.

By evening, most of us were exhausted and found a place around the campfire at some grilled fish, pork, and chicken, we drank mulled wine, sang at the tops of our lungs to a guitar, while our children humored themselves by throwing twigs into the fire.

We’d like to thank everyone who was with us on this Family Day, it was amazing!

At Startup Sauna Accelerator in Finland, we worked with startups from all over the world. They are all dreaming of going Unicorn and getting all the benefits of a large, VC backed startup. Many of them were dreaming of having their own personal massage therapist. And you know what? They gasp with surprise when they learn that Rubius has already a massage therapist for the team.

But massage for us is a way of keeping healthy, not just image. Getting a massage perfectly relaxes the muscles of back and neck and improves blood circulation. This is especially important for developers because they spend most of the day at their computers. It’s really cool that the guys in the office can get a massage with a 50% discount.

You don’t have to sacrifice health or rush somewhere at the end of the day – the best massage therapist of the city is already working for Rubius.

Rubius 9th birthday was celebrated, with its teams from Moscow and Tomsk at a picturesque recreation center on the banks of the Ob River, in July.

It started with the team leaders giving the highlights of June. Startup Sauna in Finland; business trips to both the USA and Moscow; the cooperative beginning with Rosatom Corporation; new-user growth with our products and a few other items. The coolest message that was delivered during the presentation is that 46% of Rubius annual revenue come from new customers that were recommended to us by our existing customers and this is why we like working for Rubius, the company that really reflects high quality as its main value.

After the highlights, we got down to the quest, team building on the lawn. The games intertwined our corporate values and gave cases from the life and times of Rubius in a fun playful way while developing and answering questions as we played in teams. The quest ended with the secret rites of initiations for newbies (less than a year in Rubius). We presented them lapel pin that symbolize being a part of the Rubius Team. And as each year stylish corporate sweatshirts with a Rubius logo we given to those who made it through the year.

The employees gave a gift to the management but really to the whole company – an air hockey table. Now in the game room there is a nice and useful perk for all of us.

Then the fun really got going. The Old Russian tradition of the banya (dry sauna) was stoked and the guys were sitting in there and beating each other with birch branches. Volleyball games commenced and did not end until the sunset. The center had an obstacle course and the superhuman seemed to come out of most everybody. The barbeque lured everyone at one time or another. Some humored themselves by watching the events. Some took it easy on the swings or walking. Most everyone chatted up a storm.

By evening things began to settle down and we built a fire and guitars appeared and we sang and laughed until dawn.

We met Aspirity team from Krasnoyarsk at DevPRO’17 conference. It turned out that we are like-minded in the way we think and work.

At the end of May they came to Tomsk to exchange experience. We walked Aspirity through our office, shared our approach to recruiting staff and providing relaxed and creative environment for our team as well as our budgeting and accounting system.

Aspirity team held open seminars for us and the other Tomsk IT companies. They talked about marketing, Kaizen-based company management, introducing company regulations, and development of young professionals. Later that night we had a great time in a café telling funny stories about programmers’ life.

Aspirity even shot a movie about their trip. You can watch it in the Aspirity and Rubius group. We are glad that a fortuitous meeting at DevPRO has turned into such friendship and cooperation: we already work on common projects, exchange peculiarities of corporate culture, and share knowledge.

The creative and informal atmosphere in Rubius gives a handle to come to work with pleasure. That is why from time to time you can find nice “perks” in our office.

Recently the guys have offered to get a professional ping-pong table, and the heads supported this idea. Now, during the breaks, we have really hot team tournaments for a challenge prize – a toy cow. Some guys hold it for a week! We even have a special chat where ping-pong fans share the latest news and schedule of the tournaments.

By the way, ping-pong is a very useful entertainment. It is a dynamic game in which a small ball helps eyes to relax and brain to switch to another activity. After a game the productivity increases, the tasks are easily solved and the guys are cheered up!

The efficiency of the activities of any project-based enterprises directly depends on the effectiveness of each of its projects and the current field of project management has not encouraged efficiency well. In the last few years, our experts have investigated the issue of efficiency, studied those who develop PM tools, considered possible development strategies and concluded that to gain the efficiency that we needed we had to create our own project management tool and this was the beginning of Rubius Project Manager (RPM).

RPM is a software tool for project management with the functions of calendar-network planning, monitoring the progress of work and resource management.

The following key benefits are:

• Project portfolio management
• Collective work on the plan
• Tracking the load of resources for all projects
• Automatic collection of work and adjustment of plans
• Current status of project implementation
• Typical projects and work directory
• Integration with EDMS and other systems

It is a packaged solution with extensive project management functionality taking into account the business processes of each customer who have their own peculiarities. Rubius works to always meet their client’s needs, offering their product adaptation services for businesses.

One of those customers is FAVEA. The client wanted to have advanced features for importing projects created in RPM, in MS Project in MPP format. Now we import the following:

• Export of RPM Plan Structure
  • Supports MS Project 2003, 2007, 2010 editions
  • Supports manipulating projects in MPD (Microsoft Project Database) format
• Export of Plan Resources
  • Supports modifying base settings and data like Schedule type, Start and Finish dates and Currency format settings etc.
  • Supports access to all root structures like Calendars, Tasks, Resources, Resource assignments and Relations etc.
  • Supports access to all basic and advanced properties of Calendars, Tasks, Resources, Resource assignments and Relations etc.
  • Supports reading and managing Tasks, Recurring Tasks, Resources, Resource Assignments, Relations and Calendars etc.
• Export of calendars
  • Define weekdays for the calendar
  • Define exceptions in calendars
• Export of task colors
  • Supports access to all basic and advanced properties of Calendars, Tasks, Resources, Resource assignments and Relations etc.
• Export of additional plan information
  • Update custom properties of MPP Project files and write them back to original MPP format
  • Supports working with projects in XML format at lower level and gain full control over the document without using Aspose.Tasks engine

Due to the tight deadlines for tasks implementation, it was decided to use a ready-made component that handled all the problems.

Having carried out a comparative analysis of the developers’ components represented on the market, we chose Aspose.Tasks, Aspose Company.

Aspose.Tasks for .NET offers Project management APIs that enable .NET applications to not only read and manipulate Microsoft Project® documents but also write Microsoft Project® documents in both MPP and XML formats – all without using Microsoft Project®. As with all Aspose file format APIs – Aspose.Tasks for .NET works well with both WinForms and Web Form applications.

Our developers were fully satisfied with the analysis of Aspose.Tasks component functionality. Microsoft Office Automation was an additional benefit of Aspose.Tasks. Aspose.Tasks Product Family APIs are built using managed code that do never need Microsoft Office or Microsoft Project to be installed on the machine for working with MS Project files. It is a perfect Microsoft Office automation alternative in terms of supported features, security, stability, scalability, speed and price.

The implementation of the Aspose.Tasks component went quickly and smoothly. It was facilitated by a well-written reference with real examples and a FAQ section on the website, availability of projects demonstration on the GitHub and an active forum. Aspose support pleased us with quick and competent answers to our inquiries. All of these things accelerated the process of implementation.

During the process of implementation, our team used all the component features. Not every development component has so many customization capabilities. Configuration flexibility and functionality of the component helped to achieve the goal of exporting in MPP format.

The Aspose.Tasks component is the first component from the Aspose line that has been successfully implemented in Rubius Project Manager.

It should be noted that Aspose has a large number of functional components for solving various applied problems. We will definitely consider the possibility of integration in our future products and custom projects.

Rubius along with Microsoft Innovation Center and Tomsk Polytechnic University hosted 480 IT specialists from 122 companies from Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.

DevPRO is a unique event in Tomsk, it is a non-profit conference organized by developers for developers. It grew this year to 18 presentations given in three different halls with speakers presenting at the same time. The speakers were from the United States, Germany, Montenegro, Moscow, Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk all sharing their knowledge and expertise ranging from the release of new products, 3D-visualization, Machine Learning, user interfaces, microservices, architectural approaches, security, databases and professional development of developers.

Participants were able to rate and comment on the presentations in real-time via a mobile application. The most favorite report turned out to be from the Rubius co-founder Sergey Koshevoy on the history and creation of the product Planyway.

At the conference participants plunged into virtual reality at the Unigine booth, assessed the potential of mixed reality in Microsoft Hololens glasses presented by Rubius. Several booths were set up by partner companies CFT, GOC “ASUproekt”, TomskASUproekt, Sidenis and Space-O Technologies so participants could get more acquainted with these companies.

During the breaks between speeches, people could ride on a Gyroscope, play Tanchiki using their smartphones as joysticks, and take pictures with the new mascot of the conference “Sasha the Developer”.

At the end of DevPRO’17 prizes were given away: a Quadrocopter from Space-O Technologies, virtual reality glasses from C3D Labs, and other cool and useful gadgets from e2e4 and Rubius.

Later an informal after party of DevPRO’17 continued at a restaurant, and the most persistent participants tried their hand at the intellectual IT-quiz into the following day.

Next year, Rubius plans even greater things by organizing DevPRO in a more spacious place and invite speakers that are even more famous.

We completed a huge project for one big and outstanding company.

After a retrospective, we visualized the TFS server logs with a history of commits in the form of a graph. Each peak is a separate file, which contains hundreds and thousands of code lines. Although the video lasts only 3 minutes, about 13 800 hours of painstaking work of the whole team is behind it! Refactoring at 35th second is especially eye-catching.

We congratulate our UI-designer Nadia Nashirbanova with a victory in the three-week marathon on web design by WDI school!

A lot of participants fell by the wayside. There were only two days to complete the tasks. Quality of problem solution, layout and visual communication were evaluated. Nadia took the first place and it is no coincidence – her interface design is simple, functional and has pleasant color-grade.

We wish new creative victories to you, Nadia!

SnegoGeek is back again on our summer terrace! We set up a tradition to make an IT-colleague out of snow right before the New Year. Everyone did their bit: a sales office brought a scarf and gadgets, a system administrator – fairy lights and a power unit for the heart, the administration provided a basket and a hat, and executive staff – a nose, glasses, and a mustache. Then we were waiting for a fair-weather day and made the snow sculpture.

September, 3 Rubius held the mass Tomsk frontend-developers meeting of JS community. More than 80 people gathered in the largest office of Rubius company and all the seats were occupied.

The speakers from Tomsk companies made presentations on testing, modern technologies and frameworks, as well as frontend-development trends. In particular, React testing, infrastructure construction of large JS-applications and possible alternatives for JavaScript web applications client. Rubius team lead Arthur, known for his presentations on cross-platform development at DevPRO conference, told about web components using Polymer.

After the presentations, the participants actively asked questions and raised hot-button issues. Particularly heated debates were around the technologies that are “dead”, and the ones that have right to exist. But all agreed that time-tested solutions, and not just well-promoted technologies should be used in production. The discussions continued in the kitchen and a summer terrace during the coffee break and after the event. Meetup format allowed the young and experienced developers to catch up, share best practices, as well as find a mentor as was advised by Sergey Andreev in his report.