You may remember we mentioned in an earlier post we were to rent more space. After months of waiting, we’ve finally got the keys to it. The office is in the same building in the center of Nis but on a different floor. Quite spacious, with wall-to-wall windows in some parts and a great view of the town. We love it although it’s in grave need of renovation.

Once we have it restored, we’re to get some furniture over to the place. As soon that’s done, it’s just cleaning and stylishing it the geeky way. Here are some ‘before’ pictures.

We’re growing fast. In addition to our head office in Västerås, Sweden and office in Belgrade, we’re doubling our capacities in Nis with twenty-four developers on board.

We threw a glam Christmas party on Friday at The Regent club in Nis to mark that magical time of year, one of our all-time favs.

The party kicked off at 7.30 pm. A local band was playing well pretty much everything we wanted to hear. We had a lot of guests attending the party as our friends joined too.

It was great fun chatting, dancing, singing and drinking wine till the small hours. A nice way to end 2007. Below is a happy snap. We’d rather not cram all the photos here, so check out the rest on Flickr.

Great news at Troxo! We continue to build an awesome team and are stoked to welcome Radomir Mladenovic, our chief project officer.

With a strong development background and over thirteen years experience in the IT industry, Radomir will help us manage a number of software projects. We’re lucky to have him with us. His arrival to our team now brings the total number of Troxo DOO members up to twenty-three.

So, what’s Christmas without discounts? We decided to take a moment to share with you the moments of pure delight that holidays bring…cool decorations, get-togethers, piles of presents under the tree, discounts popping up all over the net and at Troxo most certainly.

We have come up with a 40% discount on IISGuard for all of you looking to improve the performance of your IIS servers. The nicest thing about this tool is that it can easily help you pinpoint websites and scripts that give you a headache.

Good to know is that it logs all requests, both active and finished. The offer ends on December 31, 2007 so hurry up before the clock strikes 12:00 and happy holidays from Troxo!

As we like to code to music here at Troxo we wondered about the effect it has on the brain. We have come across many studies here but one by Teresa Lesiuk, Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, immediately grabbed our attention as it dealt with the effect of music listening on software design in particular.

The study, which involved 56 developers from four different Canadian software companies, was implemented in the participants’ actual work environments over five weeks.

It showed that people produce more quality work while listening to music and they finish their work faster when listening to music. It also stated that work environments with music help enhance employee moods. You may download the full text here.

The beneficial effect of music listening on work efficiency gains even more importance when you take a look at this study by Yuko Fujigaki which states that stress is present throughout almost all phases of software development.

Oblivious to such a tremendous effect of music on work performance, we asked some of our developers and designers what music they listened to while coding. Basically, our tastes differ to some extent but we all agree that we love having it around.

Ivan, Senior Software Architect: While I’m working, I prefer listening to classical music. It helps me stay focused on problems and tasks I’m working on. Vivaldi and Mendelssohn are my favorites.

Sasa, Senior Software Architect: I prefer listening to music while coding and that is a natural working environment for me. The list of my favorites is very long, but what I always love listening to is good old rock. Pink Floyd is very soft, easy and makes a good working atmosphere.

Classical music is inspiring and I sometimes put it on too. When I’m deep into a problem, music just fills the empty space around, brakes the silence and makes me more relaxed.

Dejan, Graphic Designer: At the creative stage I love to put on loud energy-filled music such as Prodigy or the UT2003 soundtrack created by Starsky Partridge and Kevin Riepl (favorite song Chemical Burn).

When doing xhtml/css I tend to listen to softer music like Air, dZihan & Kamien, Kevin Yost, James Blunt, Nelly Furtado, Amy Winehouse. Jazz anytime: Thelonious Monk, Dexter Gordon, Chareles Mingus, Miles Davis…

This post was written to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, (K. 448) to measure the disputed Mozart Effect.

There’s nothing we love more than our work being praised and recommended. To help our clients do more, we are looking to further grow our PHP team. The position is located in Nis, Serbia.

What’s in it for you?

This is an excellent opportunity for you to make your mark. We offer you the environment you need to grow as a developer, the opportunity to work on challenging projects and pick up new things every day, fun, even better colleagues and great conditions.

If you love what you do and want to push yourself for more, just drop us an email at career at troxo dot com and we’ll call you for an interview. And yeah, it’s been said a million times but a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are some photos of our team.

Why Troxo?

“I got an offer I couldn’t say no to. Seriously, being a part of the Troxo team and the chance to work with my colleagues on various challenging problems always learning new technologies makes me happy at work.”

Click here for the full interview with one of our developers. And hurry up! The kettle is on!

Our brand spanking new website has finally gone online. We’re stoked to see its release as it’s been many weeks in the making.

We have coded the site in XHTML 1.0 Strict with valid CSS to ensure compliance with accessibility standards. The aim of the new look is not only a visual change but also the need to shed more light on software outsourcing, our core activity.

We also decided to make more space for our administration and security software which is why we’ve launched iistools.com. The site focuses on IISPassword, IISGuard and AdoMonitor only and provides in-depth information on the software.

This is a great place for all of you heavily relying on Windows servers. Best of all, we’re giving away ten IISGuard licenses to welcome the first visitors to the site. Ten quickest emails to info [at] troxo dot com take them away. Now hurry up!

Many thanks to the team who worked on the new websites. Hope you enjoy them both. You’re always welcome to send us your feedback at info [at] troxo dot com.

We’re back from this year’s biZbuZZ. It’s the second IT conference on Internet marketing in the south of Serbia, with Troxo as one of the sponsors.

This was a good conference with lots of top-notch speakers and good presentations on topics such as e-commerce, online branding, case studies, online advertising and corporate presence.

Our CEO Mladen Stojanovic gave a speech at the event about top 10 pieces of advice on Internet start-ups. We’ll have the video very soon to post it here. Till then, the rest in pictures.

We are back from Synergy ‘07, Microsoft’s 6th IT conference organized in Novi Sad. It was a nice experience as we like to stay on top of what’s going on in the IT industry in the country and beyond.

To this end, Damir and Ivan hit the road for three days at the biggest IT event in Southeast Europe.

The organizers did a great job. We picked up valuable information on the latest technologies and those in the pipeline, mingled with like-minded developers and of course, we had fun.

We’ve got a new website in the pipeline which we’re really excited about. It’s been in the making for a while now. Our attention is currently focused on the development of various PHP apps but hopefully it’s going to be up and running very soon. We’re using WP as our CMS, which seems to be exactly what we needed.

Here’s a screenshot of the new look:

We love to hear from you. If you have any comments or feedback, you are welcome to send us an email at info at troxo dot com.