Tiago Silva

Frontdoor is our flagship cutting-edge Point-of-Sale SaaS service here at Hive. It is the reason why we left Microsoft to co-found Hive in the first place, as we were working in their enterprise area, and couldn't tolerate that the best products in this area were technologically and architecturally stuck 10 years in the past.

We built absolutely everything from scratch for this service, the only thing we didn't write was Python, even the Web Server and ORM were coded by us (as part from our open-source modularity framework: Colony). We didn't want to have any limitation, and wanted nothing short from perfection.

Though not a mainstream success due to a pretty saturated local market, which is very resistant to change, and other factors out of our control, it is currently in production and serving some of our clients very successfully, bringing fresh air and easiness of use to a sector dominated by mediocrity and low user experience standards.

Colony Framework is our technological pride here at Hive. It is a modularity container specification, for which we have implemented a Python version, which allows one to build software as a set of cleanly separated plugins that can be loaded, unloaded and injected during runtime without any reboot of the container.

It doesn't do much on its own, but over the years we have built Colony plugins that make it able to perform any functionality under the sun. We built Web Server plugins, ORM plugins, plugins for different communication protocols, you name it, and all from scratch without depending on any external technology. We even built Frontdoor, a SaaS ERP, as a set of Colony plugins, and it has been in production for years with amazing stability and performance.

Even though I am not the main developer in this effort, as most of the code was not done by me, the project was sparked when I was building a data migration tool that needed some modularity to allow for different input and output data sources, as well as different transformation adapters. This effort took a life of its own and ended up in the discontinuation of the data migration project as Colony started growing out of it.

I developed small plugins, did a lot of QA and bug-fixing across the entire range of plugins, wrote technical documentation, designed storyline for marketing videos, comic books and other assets, as well as other copywriting efforts.

Even though Colony is not mainstream, it is a daily life-saver for us at Hive, as it fuels a lot of projects we have done internally. We keep improving it daily, and we couldn't live without it.

LiveFit is a Runkeeper-like app for the iPhone, where the user can log his workouts, time them, chart them on a map, map routes along with their workout, share their progress, etc.

I developed this application from top to bottom for the Academy Sports + Outdoors chain of retail stores.

The application was delivered on schedule, even after accommodating multiple last minute change requests.

The client was very pleased with the quality of the code and the speed it was delivered in.

Along the way, I ended up performing QA, bug fixes, and code cleanup for the SDK provided by MapMyFitness, since this application had to be done on top of that SDK to interact with their services.

Fresh Deck Poker is a massive multiplayer online poker game developed by Idle Games, with artwork so gorgeous that it really places it beyond the competition.

I developed what was, at the time, most of the backoffice used to manage the game's sensitive mechanics, and to help administrators get an overview of what's going on with their gaming world at any certain time, pushing Django to its limits, having to go into the internals and patch it to bypass some of its limitations.

Rock Lobby is a live music discovery service that helps you find out the best shows in your area, and provides a platform for sharing photos and reviews, and connecting with fans, venues and artists.

I was handed existing iOS code from a previous developer that I needed to build on to complete the product. I ended up doing the whole thing from scratch as I was not pleased with the code quality and figured out the time I was losing doing everything again would pay up in the long run. It did pay up, and I completed the project within the budget and successfully launched in the App Store.

Mariachi was a 3D shoot em' up mobile game we developed at Hive Solutions, as we were trying to enter what was at the time, a blooming mobile gaming market.

Mariachi portrayed a renegade mariachi that tried to save his village from an evil curse by shooting a lot of eery entities back to hell.

We developed cross-platform gaming engine, with model importing, physics engine, and some quirky 3D stuff, which made us able to compile our game for Android, iOS and PC in one swoop.

I ended up helping with parts of the engine, writing a storyline, building up the game's theme and then coding the game mechanics themselves.

Unfortunately, we ended up having to change corporate strategies which made us have to discontinue this project, but we left it at a point where it was already playable (but still had to a lot polished to make it engaging).