Patrick Vlaskovits, co-author of "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany", addresses some fallacies around customer development and describes multiple approaches on how to hack "Getting Out of The Building" such that product development decisions can be made with better, higher-quality data.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring.

Modcloth.com is looking for Ruby on Rails developers to join their team in San Francisco. The full job posting follows.

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring.

TRUECar is looking for senior Ruby and Rails/Sinatra developers to join their team in San Francisco. The full job posting follows.

Vintner Jared Brandt of A Donkey and Goat winery was a technical product manager before the first dot-com crash. He and his wife spent a year in France learning biodynamic wine production methods before returning to Berkeley to found their winery. Jared discusses their approach to winemaking in this evening talk at Pivotal Labs SF.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Talking to users is a good idea but where to begin? Qualitative Research expert Laura Klein gets you started garnering valuable feedback from current and potential users. She covers appropriate research for the various stages of the development cycle and what questions qualitative research can answer effectively. The talk features practical tips on screening and recruiting users for feedback, moderating the sessions, and analyzing your data.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Riak is a fault tolerant, highly-scalable key/value store being used by companies like Mozilla, Mochi Media, Comcast and Vibrant Media. This talk focuses on the origins of Riak, the high level architecture decisions, the problems it solves and what to think about when using it to build applications.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Movember is here, and the walls of Pivotal ring with the triumphant cheer of sprouting follicles! To fight testicular and prostate cancer, many of us Pivots are joining the worldwide mustache-fest, growing facial hair exclusively on our upper lips for the entire month.

There are pictures of the growth so far on my Movember Page, where you can also go to donate to the cause.

This year I will again be auctioning off the color of my mustache. If you donate more than most, you get to pick what color my mustache will be! There are three phases, so lots of chances to win. Purple and green were an awesome combo last year, can you come up with something more ridiculous and embarrassing for me to wear?

The two highest donors before 11:59 p.m. Monday, November 15th get to pick the colors I will wear all day from November 17th through the 23rd, one color for each half of my 'stache. The two highest donors between November 16th and 11:59 p.m. on Monday the 22nd get to pick the colors I will wear from November 24th to the 30th.

The two highest donors in the final week of Movember, those donating the most between Tuesday the 23rd and the 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday the 30th get to pick the colors I will wear in my mustache for the first TWO weeks of December. That's right, I'll keep the lip caterpillar for two weeks longer, and I'll wear your team colors while I do it.

The bidding starts at $3, because Parker's already donated $2. Can you beat it? Will you make me wear a pink and orange mustache? Will you take mercy on my wife and pick blond and brown? Do I hear turquoise and fuchsia? If hair dye (or Kool-Aid) exists in that color, I will wear it.

As a popular web rendering engine, WebKit is mostly used via browsers. Sencha Engineering Director Ariya Hidayat presents a different angle: using WebKit as a library to write web development tools. Includes how to get and compile the WebKit code.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

CrowdFlower enables a quality, fast, large, global workforce to complete simple tasks. Brian O'Rourke and Chris Van Pelt create a sample app to demonstrate the API and the quality analysis tools. They also discuss lessons learned in its development.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

The founders of Irrational Design present Insightster, an app to help you encourage, discuss, iterate on, rediscover, prioritize, and execute on ideas from all over your organization. They demo a "Clean out your Icebox" Pivotal Tracker integration.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks