Ruby on Rails, iOS, Android agile developers. We are web and mobile experts.

„Digital Natives did what looked impossible: delivering a working and tested, extremely complex software in 3 months.”
Zsolt Rozsahegyi
CEO, Netlock Ltd.

At Digital Natives we don’t think in project, but in product terms – Ruby on Rails, iOS, Android or TDD, Agile methods are only the tools to make a vision, a business objective accessible. We do know that the products are going to be used and further developed by people; therefore we plan and develop user interfaces and codes the clearest possible way.

We do believe that before starting a development, enough time should be dedicated to get to know you, your product and your objectives.

Since 2006 we have realized more than 50 projects on Ruby on Rails. Since 2008 we can’t even imagine that there is a better method for web and mobile developments than the agile development. By now we have become one of the biggest agile Ruby on Rails developers in Central and Eastern Europe, having significant experience in realizing innovative, unique developments.

Web frontend technology:

HTML5, CSS, Javascript, CoffeeScript, JQuery, Backbone.js, Adobe Flash / Flex

Web backend technology:

Ruby, Ruby on Rails, SQL, noSQL(MongoDB), Key-value stores(redis, memcached), Caching, Faye, Linux / Unix sytems

Mobile technology:

iOS, Android, mobile optimized webpages

Automated testing tools:

Cucumber, RSpec, Spork, Selenium, Jenkins for continuous integration

Our own start-ups taught us how important effective product development is.

„And the winner is Mixgar from Hungary.”
TechCrunch

Apply to our Startup Program!

For us, at Digital Natives, it has always been important to dedicate enough time to our own ideas as well. Who knows? –one of our colleagues might be thinking about the next Facebook – even if it is not going to be as successful as Facebook is, thinking together is still a good thing :).

During the past years we have developed an incubation process, which enables us to screen our ideas quickly and select the ones with the biggest potential, and the ones, which we want to spend more time on.

As a result, we run several start-ups simultaneously, so we do know the difficulties and pleasures about them. Among others, we are known about the idea and development of Mixgar, main prize winner at the Investor Day CEE 2011 competition. (Jury: Esther Dyson, Stefan Glaenzer and many others). Mixgar has gained the recognition of TechCrunch as well. And in 2 months we got into the select start-ups of HackFwd, Seedcamp, and Startup Week Vienna as well. You can read about our adventures abroad on the Events page in more details.

Besides, we are developing a video based advertising system, called playertise.com, we developed a video news search program supported by a voice recognition program, called mindroom.hu and we have an app for ordering Taxi, Taxilike.com, with which you can order the taxis ranked the best anywhere in the world.

Ruby on Rails - Program language and development platform

Since 2006 we have developed more than 50 Ruby on Rails web projects. We chose this language and framework because writing codes is quicker and clearer with it than with PHP – during a given period of time we can work faster and complete the product with further functions more easily later on.

One of the keys to success is the Ruby programming language. It is a young (written in the mid 90’s), object orientated, dynamic language, designed and created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, a Japanese developer. Later on, the developer of 37signals, David Heinemeier Hansson created the “Ruby on Rails" framework, which was the basis of their project of the time, Basecamp. The project is available from open source since 2004, and is widely popular.

We attend and help organise the Budapest Ruby Meetup's events. We often deliver presentations too:

Ruby on Rails

Hungarian Ruby Blog

Ruby on Rails deployment presentation

Characteristics of the framework

Modell-View-Controller architecture – separation of business logic from the user interface

Don’t Repeat Yourself – don’t write the same codelines again and again, decrease redundancy!

Convention over Configuration - minimize the amount of the configuration files

Mobile

„With their open minded attitude and the high quality of their work, Digital Natives has become a great partner for us. I strongly believe that the digital solutions we have developed together brought valuable results to our clients.”
Gabor Szanto
Head of Digital and Innovation Team, DDB Budapest

Today it is easy to imagine solutions for each product and service which people would like to use on mobiles as well. For us as well, it is a task to extend the web solutions to mobiles too. We ourselves do live half of our lives on the mobile. We have wide experience in mobile developments as well.

Technologies, which determine our daily work:

iOS

Android

HTML5 webpages optimized to mobile

We consider our important role is to help customers to find the best solutions: when is it worth thinking about a mobile optimized webpage in Android, iPhone or eventually using cross platform solutions?

What types of phones should be used for testing?

What kind of design should be designed for the app?

How should a new app be launched?

iOS, Android and HTML5 webpages optimized to mobile

Agile Development

When we start the development of a product, we often don’t know how it should work after 3, 6 or 12 months. Time is our biggest enemy: which of the many ideas are worth to realize and in which order?

Agile methods help us in this matter: we go on in small, well designed steps (we iterate often), we observe and measure the users’ activity, and we modify the scope if necessary. During the development we develop the necessary functions only, and we write a code of such quality that it can later be modified simply.

We are an active participant of "Agile commitee", we frequently visit Agile Hungary and many of us are members of Hungarian Agile Alliance.

Wikipedia article about Scrum

Scrum Alliance

Interview with Zsolt Bodó certified Scrum trainer

According to Scrum and Kanban methods we follow the below rules during the development:

we get to understand the main processes of the product, and together with the customer, we sort them based on priorities

we start the development with the most important functions in order to dedicate the most time to test these, and in order to launch them as soon as possible (even with more complex products the main functions can be activated in 2-3 months time).

during the development we advance in small timeframes: each period has one objective, e.g. the development of a well defined group of functions (Scrum fix, Kanban handle dynamic periods).

We only plan the detailed tasks related to the next objective ensuring us enough room to build in new needs

The entire group goes over the tasks of the previous day, and that particular day, so the project is transparent, and problems come up early on

the customer is an active participant: the function of the product should continuously be designed and clarified according to new needs and priorities.

XP (eXtreme Programming) - Programming methodology

The objective of eXtreme Programming is to ensure that the newest designs get activated the fastest way possible, in a short period of time, according to agile methods. This objective can be reached only following high quality standards and having advanced infrastructure. The totality of these is eXtreme Programming.

One of such methods is the complex and automatized testing (Test Driven Development – code, process and user interface levels): the tests controlling the function of the codes are run automatically after a code detail is ready, so a faulty element can’t get into the system and we can minimize the duration of manual testing. Example for an automated test: run a user process through 3 different types of browsers and examine whether the features or logics work properly (e.g. data control)

Technologies used for testing: Cucumber, RSpec, Spork, Selenium, Jenkins for continuous integration

We are continuously training ourselves and we try to ensure the community benefits from us:

Rules of eXtreme Programming

Agile Meetup: Tempomat presentation

Agile and Extreme ruby presentation

Refactoring

Another important activity is the continuous actualization of the code during the development (Code refactoring), so if we would want to complete the system with new features, it is not necessary to rewrite the modules, since the code is up to date.

„I selected developer team after a deep dig in the developers ground.
Finally the „human factor” was one of the most important criteria, why I chose Digital Natives.”
Csaba Jori Managing Director, Zuppaa.com

Digital Natives was founded in 2006. Since that time we have continuously been expanding, by
now we have become one of the biggest agile Ruby development teams in Central and Eastern Europe.

We established Digital Natives because we like to work with innovative web and mobile based technology. The Co-Founders have varied backgrounds (technical studies, Financial MBA and social sciences), but all of them take part in the daily work on the planning and implementation phases. This allows us to provide continous, high quality work.

You can read more about the company life in our blog, or you can follow us on our Facebook / Twitter page.

We were mentioned on several portals, but we are especially proud of our New York Times interview.

Sándor Somos

CEO (Co-founder)

Sándor Somos

CEO (Co-founder)

Finally a place where the rabbit carries the gun:), but does not shoot the agile developer. We can see the wood for the trees, and our customers become our partners. Day after day I experience the open atmosphere that motivates the team and I find that the agile development is much more effective than traditional methods. (Nickname: Soma; previous jobs: KPMG, Montana; Education: MBA)

Tamás Tompa

CTO (Co-founder)

Tamás Tompa

CTO (Co-founder)

The most difficult part is to maintain quality day by day and manage to make a compromise in other things. In my opinion a professional software company is similar to a good restaurant: you need good ingredients, state of the art techniques, creativity, precise work and polite customer service. There are other ways, but they are not worth it.

Kristóf Bárdos

Business Development Director

Kristóf Bárdos

Business Development Director

I am in charge of sales, project management and consulting. If I have any spare time left, I travel (in Hungary, to Barcelona to my brother or to India), study for my university degree (Corvinus University, International Relations), play sports (soccer, squash, basketball, hiking), read (about society, sci-fi, from classical novels to contemporary literature: Thukydides to Vonnegut), listen to music (mostly rock).

Miklós Beöthy

Senior software engineer

Miklós Beöthy

Senior software engineer

I've been punishing my colleagues with my favourite music since 2006. It would be best to break down my everyday tasks to backlogs and give a higher complexity number to cooking than to playing squash. A bug ticket is my nightmare; if I could I would write tests for cheese spread; and my favourite sentence is "Yet another successful build." :)

Péter Lukács

Senior software engineer

Péter Lukács

Senior software and iOS engineer

Innovation, effectiveness, community, teamwork - these are the reasons why it has been ideal for me to work here for 4 years. Of course it also has to do with all the things we do together outside of work and the football table. :)

István Demeter

Software engineer

István Demeter

Software engineer

I've exchanged PHP for Ruby when I had met with the Rails back in 2006. After graduating I've been working as Linux system administrator for a few years, but eventually got back to developing applications because it's a much more creative, diverse job. I always try to catch up the latest technologies, know their pros and cons and when to use them. I like to spend my free time travelling, riding and fixing my bicycle, reading and watching movies in original language.

Attila Töreky

Software engineer

Attila Töreky

Software engineer

Details are of utmost importance to me, for professionalism lies in the particulars. Armoured by agile methodology, I and my helpers, i.e. HTML and CSS, fight shoulder to shoulder to achieve valid and cross browser codes, thus creating a solid base for professional development.

Gergő Sulymosi

Software engineer

Gergő Sulymosi

Software engineer

I think about development as an interactive art form. We can use the languages as brushes and the environment as a living canvas.
I use one of my most virtuous brush, the ruby language since 2009.

Gusztáv Szikszai

Software engineer

Gusztáv Szikszai

Software engineer

I am Frontend and Java script programmer. I am interested in everything related to web design and building websites. I am up-to-date with new programming languages and technologies, therefore I continuously improve my knowledge and skills.

Bonaventura Fleischmann

Software engineer

Bonaventura Fleischmann

Software engineer

I have been using the Ruby framework since 2009. I try to constantly keep up with new software development technologies and learn about their potential. The favorite part of my job is to see how a concept turns into a working application. If I’m not sitting in front of the computer, I like to swim and watch movies.

Zsófia Balogh

Software engineer

Zsófia Balogh

Software engineer

I like to program and I love Ruby because it doesn’t tie my hand and imagination. I am glad that I can learn and develop my skills while working in a pleasant surrounding with great collegaues.

Sámuel Tóth

UX designer

Sámuel Tóth

UX designer

I'm the one who is in charge for user experience design. This means my job is to find the real problems in the system and work on the best solutions for the user needs. Creating a great experience for the users is the first step to have a better experience in my life.

András Oláh

Project manager
Scrum master

András Oláh

Project manager / Scrum master

Scientists say that with correct work and time management every difficulties can be overcome. As a project manager I try to transpose this concept to reality. Like our customers I always have many ideas what features should an application have. Fortunately the agile methodology we follow here at Digital Natives makes sure that only the really important (from the business perspective) features that fit to the time frame and cost will be developed. In my free time when I'm using my computer I like to do yoga and read on my Kindle.

Tünde Tompa

Project assistant

Tünde Tompa

Project assistant

My task is to document projects, handle background material and assist the software engineer. I take part in the planning and brainstorming of smaller projects. In my free time I go cycling and hiking, or play squash with my colleagues.

Rita Dózsa

Financial assistant

Rita Dózsa

Financial assistant

Receptionist and brimstone. Guard of the office order.

Gyula

Notification manager

Gyula

Notification manager

To tell you the truth I don’t like working here. People always think it’s my fault, but it never is. My favourite music is the score of Indiana Jones and I hate Star Wars.

Watch me when I’m working: http://vimeo.com/17637539

Toptal

Toptal is a Silicon Valley based service that connects the most talented, carefully selected software engineers with global companies. Therefore we are especially proud that Toptal has chosen us to take part in the development of its own Platform and we can be a member of the Toptal prestigious professional network.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

„Having worked with Digital Natives on an update to our corporate website, I have been very pleased with their development. I have found them fast, reliable and creative in their problem solving and have been very satisfied with their output.” James Leay, COO String Labs Limited

String Labs

String Labs (London) provides powerful AR (Augmented Reality) engine for iPhones and iPads. String™ recognises framed images and understands where they are in 3D space. It's a piece of software you can plug in into any iOS project, that lets you display rich 3D graphics on top of the camera view as if they existed in the real world. We are proud to support String™ with our talented developer team.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

„With their open minded attitude and the high quality of their work, Digital Natives has become a great partner for us. I strongly believe that the digital solutions we have developed together brought valuable results to our clients.” Gabor Szanto, Head of Digital and Innovation Team, DDB Budapest

Agencies

We work together with several international network agencies such as Isobar, DDB, Y&R, Grey. We support them with our creative thinking during the development of digital concepts, designing UI, and of course during the execution of programming.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5, iOS, Android, JavaScript

T-Home Sofa Sector

For the 2012 European Football Championship DDB Agency’s client T-Home wanted to provide a virtual “Sofa Sector” so people following the events on the Internet could feel the atmosphere in the stadiums. Visitors could “sit in” on the fan camps of various playing teams to leave comments on a common wall and enhance the atmosphere with audio effects ranging from drums to vuvuzela. The site was optimized for mobile and desktop versions.

Technology: HTML5, Javascript, Ruby on Rails

„When we started to meet with agile development, we asked Digital Natives, one of the most experienced agile developer team in the Hungarian community, to share their experience with us: what were their difficulties, and what were the benefits of the introduction.” Péter Antal, Development Director Telenor Hungary Plc

Telenor

In 2011 Telenor Hungary - as one of the most significant local agile company - invited us to share our experience in the field of Agile development methods. Therefore we summarized our knowledge: Theory of the methods, difficulties during the implementation, unique solutions which came up during the adaptation of the methods like Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming.

Missboat

Missbot (London) is an exciting new startup for boat owners. Missboat is a todo list application, which helps the boat owners and captains to keep the boat in order. The first version was tailored to web, which will soon be extended to mobile platforms too.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

WWF

Freedom for the island. You (as a person or on behalf of a corporate) can donate for saving Szabadság Sziget (Freedom Island) through a WWF Facebook application. You can adopt small parts of the island and your Facebook profile photo will be displayed in the adopted area, just like in the million dollar website. We supported the project by the developing this application and adopting a small part of the island.

Technology: Ruby on Rails

Mixgar

Mixgar is a next generation jukebox service, which creates playlists automatically for a bar, based on people’s Facebook profile and the music stored on smartphones. Everybody, who is checked into the place as a guest can vote for the list through a mobile app.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

www.mixgar.com

Mindroom

Mindroom.hu video search, and mediaobserver application, supported by speech recognition. It processes 12 hours of more than 50 television and radio channel broadcasts a day.

Technology: Ruby on Rails

www.mindroom.hu

Playertise

Playertise displays ads in online videos. The software meets two basic needs: on one hand media owners can monetize their video contents, since it takes less than an hour to insert the Playertise ad server code. On the other hand, advertisers can upload their customized advertisements or they can create them from panels with only a few clicks. Playertise can serve even highly visited systems, e.g. Indavideo (4,5 mio downloads / day) or Ustream. The system is integrated with the Mindroom voice recognition engine, so one can target the ads in videos based on the video content as well (at the moment it is available in Hungarian, Polish and Romanian as well).

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5, Flash

www.playertise.com

„Finally Zuppaa went live as originally planned, in time, within our budget, with the expected functionality. Even with a little more...” Csaba Jori, Managing Director, Zuppaa.com

Zuppaa

Zuppaa.com is an exciting Hungarian startup, with which anyone can put together his own web profile page, integrating in one page 8 social network’s posts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
The first version was developed in 2 months, which enabled our customer to enter the market very quickly.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

www.zuppaa.com

„We have been working with Digital Natives for more than a year now on developing and extending a B2B purchasing application. They did the initial phase of the application in 190 man days and since then we have successfully completed about 5 additional revisions. The application that they designed and developed has been online since Q2 2011 and is used by around 500 people on a daily basis. We have built an excellent relationship with Digital Natives, and we are looking forward to working with them in the future.” Tamas Lorince, Head of Technology, Electool Ltd.

Electool Fluenta

Fluenta is structured enterprise requisition handling application from Electool. Its users request internal or external products and services from a central catalogue or through an interactive form. The requisition goes though a workflow according to company procedures and will turn into a purchase order after approval.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

„Digital Natives did what seemed to be impossible: delivering a working and tested, extremely complex software in 3 months. I assigned them two product developments and their integration, because of their creativity and highly skilled developers. They used the techniques of Scrum and eXtreme Programming in an efficient way.” Zsolt Rozsahegyi, CEO, Netlock Ltd.

E-gyűlés, secured video conference system for Netlock

With the aid of „Egyűlés” companies can enhance their assemblies. The main features are live video communication and agenda and voting creation. The unique thing about „Egyűlés” - all video conferences and assemblies are secure thanks to Netlock. Netlock's secure technology recognized by law.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, HTML5

www.egyules.hu

Travel Fan Club

For the request (commission) of White Rabbit we developed an airplane ticket finder and travel organizer application for Budapest Aiport.

Technology: Ruby on Rails

Street Luge

Street Luge is a web-based arcade game where the player slides down a hill on a street luge board (sled), racing other AI players in more difficult levels. The game design and level structure provided by the client was developed in the Unity video game engine. The application can run from any browser where the Unity Web Player is installed.
Implemented in partnership with 20Húngaros.

Technology: Unity, Web

Street Luge

KIPU Linguas

Kipu Linguas is an innovative and interactive web-based language learning application developed within the framework of the South American Start-up Chile program. The novelty of the site is that it guides learners to the right solution by systematically combining language-independent pictures with text and audio clips of target language. The various types of exercises (finding the correct word or sentence, word order rearrangement, answer by listening, etc) with gradually harder tasks cover everyday language situations and examples.
Users can invite and challenge their Facebook friends. At this moment the service is available for learning English only, but the system is ready for another language expansion. The paid version of Kipu Linguas is integrated in South America’s most popular Pago Seguro payment system. The application has a user-friendly administration interface where the users and hundreds of pictures, texts and audio clips can be managed.

Technology: HTML5, Javascript

Gallina Blanca

Gallina Blanca is a leading food service company in Spain and Italy. Our job was frontend development (HTML-CSS-JS) based on a design received in two languages. The main challenge was to create a responsive design which works well on desktop, tablet and mobile devices and complies with W3C standards.
Implemented in partnership with 20Húngaros.

Technology: HTML5, responsive design

Gallina Blanca

Mixgar mobile

The web surface of Mixgar optimized to mobile has been designed in a way that users get almost the same user experience as if they were using an application. During the project it was important to make the application available for browsers of the latest Android, iOS platforms as well as Windows Mobile and earlier phones, like Symbian phone browsers too. With Mixgar, people in a bar, home party or festival can vote on which music to play.

Technology: HTML5, Javascript

www.mixgar.com

Fineguide

We have developed the first countrywide restaurant search mobile application for Professional Ways. The service is about screening the best restaurants in the country based on name, location, cuisine and price. A Premium version of the service is going to be available soon, including extra features. It exists on iOS and Android platforms as well.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, iOS, Android

Repjegy

The aim of Repjegy.hu’s mobile webpage is to provide a simple and quick way to search and book airline tickets. To ensure platform-independence, we decided to develop a mobile optimized website instead of a native application. Designing the data entry methods was the biggest challenge for this project. The process of searching and booking an airline ticket requires the user to enter and set many mandatory and optional parameters on a small screen with a touch input keyboard. This is why it was very important to rethink the methods and processes of data entry compared to the desktop version while keeping the main functionalities of the sites intact. The whole process of booking can be executed from a phone as well.

Technology: HTML5, Javascript, Single Page Interface (SPI)

Taxilike

With the help of Taxilike you can order the cheapest, fastest and highest ranked taxis in the world through an Android or iOS app. The applications are available on the App Store and Google Play

Technology: Ruby on Rails, iOS, Android

www.taxilike.com

Batiescape

Batiescape is an arcade game for children developed on iOS and Android platform. The game is controlled by the mobile device’s accelerometer. Based on the design provided by the client we developed the application in the Unity cross-platform game engine which allows us to port the game to different mobile platforms.
Implemented in partnership with 20Húngaros.

Technology: Unity, iOS, Android