Summersault Blog

The schedule of talks for the upcoming YAPC::NA 2010 Perl conference have been announced, and they include several presentations by Summersault staff:

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RICHMOND, IN – Summersault is announcing that it will be experimenting with an unlimited paid vacation benefit for its employees.  The change is one part of the company’s overall efforts to facilitate a successful balance between “work life” and “personal life,” and to attract and retain qualified professionals in our industry.

The unlimited paid vacation is available to employees who have been with the company for at least a year, and provides a single, simple policy that covers time out of the office for actual vacations, illness, personal days, parenting, jury duty, religious holidays, and other plans that staff want to make.

Summersault’s previous vacation benefit still offered up to four weeks per year of paid time off, but this program represents a new approach.

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Click to view full size PDF flyer

RICHMOND, IN – Summersault website development is inviting the Richmond community to attend an open house at its new office at 710 East Main Street, Suite 200.  Since occupying the building in 2009, the company has updated and renovated the three-story building, designed by prominent architect John A. Hasecoster and built in 1887.

The open house event, to be held on March 25th between 4 and 6 PM, will include tours of the company’s new space, light refreshments, a ribbon cutting ceremony and various door prizes.

“This move represents our third location on Main Street since we started in 1997, and it’s the best one yet,” said Chris Hardie, Principal of Summersault.  “We’re excited about finding a space where we have room to grow, while remaining in the vibrant downtown business community where we’ve built our company.”

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Nate Smith joined Summersault’s team as an intern in 2009 while completing a degree in Computer Science at Earlham College. Now in 2010, he is working full time as a software developer at the company.  As the newest member of our staff, Nate agreed to answer a few questions so you can get to know him better: Read the rest of this entry »

Summersault is co-sponsoring Blog Indiana: Richmond on March 15, 2010, a free regional event focused on social networking technologies.  The event will be held in the Graf Center at Indiana University East in Richmond at 6:30 PM, and will feature a talk by Brad J. Ward about “What’s Next on the Social Web?”  Come enjoy the free food and drinks, and don’t miss this opportunity to network with other technology and marketing professionals in our area.

RICHMOND, IN – Martha Stewart is no stranger to the cause of adopting homeless pets, and in a live segment on her March 18th show, Stewart featured Adopt-a-Pet.com, a pet adoption website built and maintained by Summersault, LLC in Richmond.

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Richmond, IN – Summersault announced today that it will contribute $1,000 as a sponsor of the upcoming Lemonade Day event being held in Richmond, Indiana on May 3, 2009.  Lemonade day nurtures entrepeneurial skills in young people by teaching them how to start, own, and operate their very own lemonade business. Read the rest of this entry »

Richmond, IN – Summersault, LLC has teamed up with Girls, Inc. and Wayne County foundation as one of the sponsors for the oral history project “What Is Your Story?”.

The project is in cooperation with StoryCorps, whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. Read the rest of this entry »

If you read my previous post about 10 Reasons to Work at Summersault, you may have noted Reason #5: In-depth performance reviews provide you with concrete professional goals and feedback on your successes. As we wrap up our Fall review cycle for staff here, I thought I’d say a little more about just what that process involves.

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This article was originally written for publication in a trade magazine about the BSD family of operating systems; it’s been updated slightly since then.

When a friend and I started our technology business 11 years ago in 1997, we didn’t choose FreeBSD, it chose us.  But we’re sure glad it did, and we came to build our company on FreeBSD.

We started out with a focus on graphic design and website development.  We were small, starting out in a college dorm room, but with high aspirations about what we could do for the world.  It was only after a few projects that we realized we needed a place to send our clients for hosting the websites we had just built for them.  When we asked a friend who was involved in running a small local dial-up Internet Service Provider where to host, he offered us some space on one of their servers, where they were already hosting a number of websites.

We got our FTP username and password, and we were off and running.  We eventually co-located with that local ISP, and partnered with them enough that they gave us shell access on that shared web hosting server, and eventually even root access.  It was a FreeBSD box running version 2.1 of the operating system.

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