As a remote friendly company, we gather the whole team together once a week to review our progress, introduce new projects and share tips, tools and our general learning experiences.

We’d like to share 52 things we’ve learned or discovered throughout 2016!

Week 01

Tips for Virtual Meetings
Shared by Jordi

Icebreakers for getting virtual meetings off to a great start and good tips for keeping them interesting.

Week 02

16 Personalities
Shared by Luciano

Get insights about your own personality, your strengths and weakness by taking this test. The whole team took part and we published the results in a blog post.

Week 03

Git Flow Cheatsheet
Shared by Stefano

A nice infographic explaining Git Flow and it’s tools to automatically do merges, tags and releases.

Week 04

Bugfender Receives 100k Investment
Shared by Aleix

Bugfender was selected as one of the best startups in the European Union and was awarded a 100k investment from IMPACT.

Week 05

Parse Shuts Down
Shared by Joan

Parse was a collection of tools to help mobile developers. Fortunately they announced their closure with plenty of time and open sourced part of their server code.

Week 06

Mailtrack
Shared by Brian

Use Mailtrack to see when people open your emails or click on links within them.

Week 07

Particle
Shared by Jordi

Particle is an Arduino-style IoT prototyping board with an API so that you can send commands to it from anywhere.

Week 08

Vectors Come to Android
Shared by Vito

Vectors come to Android for any devices running version 2.1 or higher.

Week 09

Bugfender Sponsors mdevcon 2016
Shared by Aleix

Bugfender will be sponsoring mdevcon (short for Mobile Developers Conference) this year, a weekend-long conference for mobile developers by mobile developers.

Week 10

Software Development Methods Explained with Cars
Shared by Diego

The only thing more difficult than building software for a client, is explaining how software is built to a client.

Week 11

Duet Display
Shared by Pablo

Try Duet Display and turn your iOS device into your secondary monitor.

Week 12

Trello Chrome Extension
Shared by Fran

Enhance your productivity with useful shortcuts from the new Trello extension for Chrome.

Week 13

Bugfender Releases Android SDK
Shared by Aleix

Bugfender has released the Android SDK, now you can improve your Android apps quality with the best remote logger.

Week 14

Alfred
Shared by Adam

Use workflows to run Applescript and Terminal commands from spotlight-like app Alfred.

Week 15

CaptionBot
Shared by Marc

Upload a picture to Microsoft’s CaptionBot and it attempts to describe it using natural language.

Week 16

Google Releases Agera
Shared by Jose

Agera is a library from Google for reactive programming in Android.

Week 17

CSS Flexbox Tutorials
Shared by Fran

Here’s an entertaining way of learning the CSS flexbox model.

Week 18

Microsoft Flow
Shared by Luciano

Flow is Microsoft’s version of IFTTT, allowing you to connect apps and services.

Week 19

Opera VPN
Shared by Stefan

Opera has released a new, free VPN offering that blocks ads and trackers on iOS. They claim to respect your privacy as well.

Week 20

Sell Photos with Snapwire
Shared by Fran

Leverage your existing photos and earn some cash with Snapwire!

Week 21

PJAX
Shared by Brian

PJAX is a jQuery plugin which lets you easily add complex server-rendered ajax interactions within a webpage.

Week 22

Chrome Remote Desktop
Shared by Pol

Give access and share your computer with Chrome Remote Desktop. Great for fixing issues with clients (and parents).

Week 23

ButlerBot for Trello
Shared by Adam

Trello has introduced their first bot ButlerBot, providing some awesome automation in natural language.

Week 24

App Review Guidelines
Shared by Pablo

For WWDC 2016, Apple have released their App Review Guidelines as a comic.

Week 25

Swagger
Shared by Jose

Swagger is a powerful framework for API documentation.

Week 26

Adam Sci-Fi Film
Shared by Luciano

Watch Adam, a short sci-fi film, created and rendered in realtime with Unity game engine.

Week 27

Client Care
Shared by Adam

How better customer service attracts and retains better clients.

Week 28

Blisk
Shared by Aleix

Blisk is a new web browser that helps developers when building responsive sites.

Week 29

Toggl
Shared by Aldo

Toggl is a great time tracking alternative to Harvest!

Week 30

Google Formulas
Shared by Fran

Use Google formulas to automatically pull-in currency information or even translations into to your Google Sheets.

Week 31

Timezone.io
Shared by Luciano

Use Timezone.io to keep track of your teammate’s local time around the globe.

Week 32

Headspace
Shared by Luciano

Headspace is an app for guided meditation, great before work and only takes only 10 minutes.

Week 33

Stay Awake at Work
Shared by Fran

An amusing device to help you stay awake at work.

Week 34

FLEX by Flipboard 
Shared by Jordi

Flex is a really nice tool for debugging iOS applications on-device.

Week 35

Inspectlet
Shared by Jordi

Use Inspectlet to see how customers actually use your website, not just how you think they do!

Week 36

NGROK
Shared by Brian

When developing things which use webhooks ngrok makes life a lot easier, offering http and https tunnels.

Week 37

Angular 2 is Released
Shared by Aleix

Angular 2 is finally released! Time to start building some awesome things.

Week 38

Morality in Languages
Shared by Brian

Speaking in a different language can cause you think differently, morally speaking.

Week 39

Easy Invoicing
Shared by Adam

Create and send invoices and estimates, track time and expenses and accept online payments with Invoicely.

Week 40

Beware of the Manchineel Tree
Shared by Nuria

Surrounding our remote office in Martinique are Manchineel trees, full of toxins that can cause blistering of the skin, blindness and can even be fatal if eaten!

Week 41

Our Teammates on Redbull TV
Shared by Pol

Our teammates Aleix and Pol and their Castellers team featured on Red Bull TV.

Week 42

Oversight
Shared by Stefan

Oversight is a free macOS app similar to Little Snitch that observes processes accessing your mic and camera.

Week 43

Brand Colors: What They Say About You
Shared by Adam

Branding is such an important aspect on how customers perceive our products, services and messages.

Week 44

Mobile App Security Vulnerabilities
Shared by Jordi

The top 10 security vulnerabilities in mobile apps from OWASP.

Week 45

SubjectLine
Shared by Adam

SubjectLine is a great marketing tool that rates and provides suggestions for email subjects.

Week 46

Quick, Draw!
Shared by Adam

This is a fun AI experiment from Google that guesses what you’re drawing.

Week 47

Useful Tools for Gifs
Shared by Vito

Monosnap and Licecap are great, free tools to help you turn screen recordings into an animated gif.

Week 48

IoT Project Directory
Shared by Paolo

Codemade.io is a nice website full of Internet of Things projects to inspire you after learning a new programming language.

Week 49

App Transport Security
Shared by Jordi

Apple will be enforcing App Transport Security (ATS) from January

Week 50

Find My Phone
Shared by Joan

A short film about what happens when phones get stolen.

Week 51

UX Tools
Shared by Pablo

A great website compiling the most useful UX tools (also UI) for prototyping, collaboration, monitoring and more.

Week 52

Gmail Extends CSS Support
Shared by Pol

Gmail now supports some CSS media queries in its web app. The full specification of media queries can be found here.

 

We hope you’ve enjoyed these tools from nearly 1,000 we’ve suggested this year. We continue to share our learning experiences and new and exciting tips we find.

What tools or devices have you discovered this year? We’d love to hear.