Today is the official Fourth Birthday of RogueSheep, Incorporated.

Four years ago on February 17th, 2004 a group of restless engineers that had all left their cozy positions as engineers and engineering managers at Adobe Systems took the next step in making their little startup business a reality by filing the articles of incorporation that officially birthed RogueSheep.

Its been a fairly remarkable 5+ years years since the first gatherings that would lead to the formation of our beloved little business. From basement meetings and home offices, to the christening of our official headquarters in Seattle. From the launch of our first product, to the suspension of its further development. We’ve lived through the departure of old sheep and the arrival of new sheep. Product ideas have come and gone; projects have been canceled only to be revived and later suspended. We’ve done work for clients as small as a group publishing the writings of Tibetan monks, to as large as world-renowned software vendors and retail chains. Altogether we’ve seen and done quite a few remarkable feats and learned a phenomenal amount about running a business along the way. Throughout it all we have continued to use our experiences, the successes as well as the occasional missteps, to hone our business model and refocus our efforts.

Personally, I couldn’t be happier with how it has all turned out. The decision to leave the comfortable confines of the large corporation and to strike out as an independent developer ranks as one of the best decisions I have ever made. Sure there have been those scary moments; wondering if its really all going to work and can we really support our families doing this? Its definitely a ton of hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that running your own business isn’t a 60+ hour a week job at the minimum. If all you have ever known is the sheltering womb of the mother corporation, it can be quite a shock to find out how many little details someone else has always taken care of for you.

Still, I can’t imagine anything more exciting or enticing than my current job. I learn something new every week and its certainly never boring around here. Much like the joy of producing a new piece of software from nothing but bits in the ether, growing a business from the embryonic, huddled meetings in a basement to a stable fixture with a solid reputation and excellent prospects for the future is nothing short of intoxicating.

As RogueSheep enters its fifth year, things are continuing to look great. We have plans for a notable expansion of staff this year and are on track to deliver some innovative new technology to the market. We continue to work with existing clients on exciting new projects while looking to navigate new partnerships and alliances while moving forward. I predict a thrilling and banner year as our toddler comes into its own.

Happy Birthday RogueSheep and thanks to my tireless partners and associates for making this such an excellent company to work with and for.

Most of our work at RogueSheep revolves around custom development of graphics and publishing applications for specialized workflows, automation and integration with other software components. We focus particularly on InDesign, InCopy and the other Adobe Creative Suite applications with an occasional foray into Quark XPress and general MacOS or Windows application development.

Though we love our positions within the flock, there are a few downsides for our developers. Almost all of the modern publishing and graphics applications have a long legacy in C and/or C++ and the Carbon APIs in particular on the Macintosh. The monolithic size of many of these applications coupled with the need for cross-platform development means it will be a long time yet before this situation changes substantially. Most of us have been working on this technology for many, many years. This of course is a great asset for our clients and creates a market for our skills.

Still, it is no secret that most engineers thrive on the chance to play with the newest and freshest technology our discipline has to offer. Unfortunately, our skills in these venerable technologies that pay the bills now may work against our success in the future. Besides just boredom, there are other dangers present in this cycle. As time marches on, our skill sets run the risk of stagnating, which in turn will marginalize our future market position.

Another, perhaps not so obvious, downside comes in the form of potentially stifling the creative expression of our developers. Many aspects of software development, be it user interface design or code architecture, are truly expressions of creative forces focused by the developer. Often, the nature of a consulting project means that the creative aspects of the components under development are already well-baked. The application of a creative solution can be too risky in a mature product. For instance, consider a typical porting project. Often there is just simply not the required allocation of testing resources to justify cleaning up or fixing an existing bad design. Similarly, potential improvements to the user interface can’t always be authorized when the client has not budgeted for training and revision to user guides and/or help documentation.

Realizing that happy engineers are more productive engineers, RogueSheep has decided to borrow a page from Google and has implemented a new employee benefit this past year: Pet Sheep Time. The concept of Pet Sheep Time is to allocate paid time for pursuing the personal development interests of each employee. Because much of our revenue is based on billable hours on projects with tight deadlines, we can’t justify a full 20% time plan the way Google does.

What we do instead is start with a base of 10 days of vacation per year. In addition, we allocate another 15 days of extended vacation that is exchangeable directly for Pet Sheep Time. These extended vacation days trade at a ratio of 1:2, so 5 days of extended vacation turn into 10 days of Pet Sheep Time. If you just need to shake off the monotony of the day job with some time at the beach and surf with the family, you can take a long vacation. On the other hand, if 2 weeks of fun and sun is enough for you, max out the Pet Sheep time for a decent personal project development cycle.

Of course, much like an extended period of vacation, Pet Sheep Time taken in bulk needs to be approved with the team and scheduled at an appropriate time for the current workload. RogueSheep also reserves the right of first refusal for any newborn Pet Sheep. Perhaps it will just become a free offering on our web site, or maybe it becomes an internal tool that makes all our jobs easier. In rare cases we might even find the work to be directly marketable. Either way, RogueSheep benefits from happier, more productive workers enjoying continual expansion of their personal skill set and education.

The reality of the past months has meant that we have been busy almost non-stop. We haven’t yet had a chance to pursue breeding new Pet Sheep, except for a few sporadic moments here and there. We look forward to combating that problem by hiring a few new developers in the coming months, at which point I hope we find more time to exercise our new pets. So, dear readers, what do you think about Pet Sheep Time? I will report back here on how the system works and detail any tweaks we make to the plan as we go along.