A: You must be following our twitter feed! Non-Fridays are quite different from Fridays …more on that later. For us a typical day here in the Melbourne office is focused around two important core events. One is the 10:00am coffee run and the other is the 3:30pm coffee run! Coffee, along with print management is part of the culture here at PaperCut Software. As you’ll see from our blog, we’re all certified coffee baristas! Most of us have espresso machines at home and even dabble a little in home bean roasting. All job interviews start with coffee questions and you’ll even find references around our website and manuals. We often say all we do is turn coffee into code!

On a more serious note, our day normally starts with a dose of support. We have a policy where everyone starts out with some customer support (either technical support or sales support). Developers jump in for a hour or so at the start of the day. This approach ensures us developers have close contact with our users. Nothing helps turn ideas into applications more than being “in the trenches”.


Q: Tell me a little about what you do on Fridays?

A: Fridays are quite different to other days. We try to make Friday the “ideas day”. The company puts in Friday lunch for the team. We have a “food roster” and rotate around a selection of Pizza, Indian, Chinese, Lebanese and Japanese Sushi (to keep everyone happy!). Often the food is complimented with some homebrew beer. Tom, one of our core software developers, is also our resident (and award winning) beer brewer. Tom assists us in appreciating the finer points of beer. We then follow up lunch with a “tech talk”. This is where we share our knowledge on all manner of geeky topics. For example last Friday we did a session on keyboard shortcuts for the Eclipse IDE, and this week Hendrik will be taking everyone through Linux filesystem management with LVM. Topics are usually “Geek factor 10″, however after some of Tom’s beer (or good coffee) they always seem interesting for even the less geeky in the team. To mix things up a little, we’ve also started a Friday darts contest. Of course, this has gotten the geek treatment as well and rules like “ending on a prime number” often get thrown in to mix!

Q: How do you choose what to add in releases? How has that changed over time?

A: We have so many ideas. It’s hard to make a call on which feature to work on next. To make it easier we try to leave it to our users to make the decision. We ask customers to vote, and also bounce ideas off the sites we work closely with. Recently we’ve done lots of work under our Adopt A Feature program, as many of our large university customers have specific requirements, and need to “jump the queue”. Recently we’ve got the feeling that we’ve been doing too many of these so over the next few months we’re focusing back on core highly voted features!

Q: Tell me a little about your Developing World License? How was that brought about?

A: The developing world license was an initiative introduced by John about 7 years ago. We were detecting quite a high portion of piracy (unpaid copies of PaperCut) from developing countries. We obviously frown on that, but we can understand why it was occurring in poorer regions. John thought it would be good idea to offer subsidized or sponsored licenses for schools and colleges in these regions. The program has been a great success and we have small schools in Africa running PaperCut on networks powered by generators! It’s a great program as we hear some very interesting stories about how PaperCut is making a real difference. In many cases the developing world license takes the form of a Western school sponsoring a school in a developing region. Often this does not mean money, but rather some IT assistance via email to help them set up PaperCut. Many schools don’t have full time IT staff and it’s the teacher doubling as a system administrator. We’re proud that PaperCut is helping education sites like the animal ranger school in Tanzania or the Mercy Ships mission into Benin in Africa.

Q: Prospective or new customers may not be familiar with your release schedule, please enlighten us a bit about your timelines and why you choose to do it that way? 

A: We develop PaperCut under a “release often policy” and try to get a new version out every 6 to 8 weeks. This ensures we can get new features out as fast as possible. Having said that we don’t expect every site to upgrade PaperCut every time, however when you do upgrade, you’ll know that you’re getting the latest features fresh from our development team. Also on a pragmatic side the shorter release cycles take a little stress away from our development team. If a bug does slip through the testing net (which does happen from time to time!) we’re able to roll out a fix very quickly as we’re well rehearsed in quick turnarounds.

As a side-note, some think it seems strange that a software company would highlight that their software has bugs. This is also an important part of our development philosophy. We work hard on transparency. All bugs are disclosed in our release history, and urgent bugs are pushed out immediately via our knowledge base here.

Q: We know that the folks at PaperCut promote being green, how do you put that in practice?

A:  A lot of what PaperCut is about is saving paper and being green and you’ll find features such as your organization’s environmental impact is very visible in the application. We also have a new idea on how to present this information and encourage even more savings so stay tuned for future releases!

Of course we also try to be green in our office. When we need to send out paper invoices or print marketing brochures you’ll find that they’re on 100% recycled paper. Ann, our office manager is also our “paper overlord” and she takes care to ensure that paper used for print testing is used more than once!

We regularly find that one of the developers is testing PaperCut on the office printers, which often results in ransomed print jobs, along the lines of “It says here your print job costs $4.00. Pay up and I’ll release it for you!”.