“A mathematician”, according to the late Hungarian mathematician Alfred Renyi, “is a device for turning coffee into theorems”. Seems like good old Alfred knew a thing or two about intellectual work, he and colleague Paul Erdos of Erdos number fame were known to consume copious amounts of the stuff. With work at PaperCut occasionally requiring a brain cell or two, it is no coincidence that the location for PaperCut’s R&D facilities was chosen to be in close proximity to a strategic source of this magic potion that fuels all activity in making, supporting and maintaining Print Control Software: Cafe Vermeer.

Not officially on PaperCut’s payroll due to the secretive, high priority nature of their mission, Cafe Vermeer’s Rosalina and Eric are on stand-by 8 hours a day wielding advanced machinery to whip coffee beans into a state consumable by PaperCut’s demanding and discerning coders should their BCC* drop below minimum comfort levels. Caffeine demands tend to culminate in twice-daily coffee pilgrimages, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, although a debate on whether coffee should be consumed French-style right after lunch or English-tea-style later in the afternoon has been causing a division in the office population along lines of provenance (Being of German origin, I subscribe to the former).

Haunting memories linger at PaperCut from when Vermeer was closed for a day forcing the indignity of sourcing second-tier material from so-called ‘other cafes’ in the area. This shows that the consistent quality of the caffeinated and the occasional cocoa-flavored beverages fabricated in Cafe Vermeer is a secret ingredient in the consistent quality of PaperCut’s software and support. So is their effort of maintaining the coffee preference chart mapping our developer’s names to their default coffee order so one can stay focused on semantics of the ‘volatile’ keyword in Java version 1.3 which …. ah but this story will be told another time.

So what about the 21st century corollary to the mathematician coffee thesis: “a software developer is a device for turning coffee into code”? Were our Hungarian mathematicians alive today, they would surely agree.

*blood caffeine concentration

What sets working at PaperCut apart from run-of-the-mill jobs is the fair balance of hands-on customer care and high-minded technical development that everyone here gets involved in. (Well that and the free gourmet coffee.) In other companies out there these activities are usually separated into separate departments, which more often than not results in some sort of Chinese Wall that makes sure customers’ concerns get preciously little attention in product development.

In “The Power of the Marginal” technology entrepreneur and writer Paul Graham writes about the competitive advantage of companies thus structured: “The needs of customers and the means of satisfying them are all in one head.” In practice that means that at PaperCut, the customer’s question about a printer that seems not to be supported and the resulting update to the software that is being delivered to them by email are not more than a few hours apart. Bigger features may take a few weeks but we don’t usually refuse any functionality that has been demanded by at least 5 or so of our customers. And while other software products will entertain you with messages like “Error 0x800051ef has occurred”, error messages in PaperCut come with a one-click button that will deliver detailed information directly onto the developer’s desk so that the problem can be pinned down on the spot and the answer emailed back to the customer.

This is also why I recommend our customers to subscribe to Upgrade Assurance, where at little additional cost to their license they get a first-row seat in this feedback loop and can focus on their actual work, knowing that their print accounting will be kept up-and-running for years to come.

A big hello to the world and PaperCut’s customers. As a new developer on the PaperCut team I am excited to be part of the new directions in which development of PaperCut’s Print Management Software is progressing. So many things to sort out on the first day! Where is the coffee? Where is the stationery supply cabinet? And where are the umlauts and accents on the keyboard?

Wait a minute, umlauts? That’s correct, I am looking forward to catering especially to our German- and French-speaking customers’ concerns. So please hold for these important messages:

Guten Tag! Ich freue mich, unseren deutschsprechenden Kunden als direkter Ansprechpartner im Team von PaperCut zur Verfügung zu stehen.    

Bonjour à nos clients français et francophones. N’hésitez pas de me contacter avec vos besoins et soucis. 

Stay tuned to this frequency for more news from myself in the upcoming weeks.