Wizard Development

Growing apps for growing businesses.

We are closed

We are closed. Wizard Development was the result of a passion for learning, teaching and for each other. We endeavored to improve our communities and ourselves. After almost 3 years of service and many successful projects, we can safely say we left our dent.

However, a mission such as ours never ends. We now continue it with other wonderful teams on other projects and with other companies. We thank our clients for the opportunity to have worked with you and we hope to get a chance to do it again.

-The Wizard Development Team

Prototypes to Production

Whether you have a successful product in need of new features, a proof of concept ready to be developed, or an unweildy prototype that is ready to be taken to the next level, we are here to help. We pair with entrepreneurs to create or build upon web and mobile apps to improve features, reliability, and flexibility. We know that product fit requires iteration, experiementation, and feedback, so we use agile methods to quickly improve and deliver.

Product Development

Make your software work for you. You know what your business needs, we know how to build it. We build the tools that your team uses to keep the edge in your market and the apps that allow you to provide services in new and unique ways.

Skill Sharing

You know how to build your product. We know how to improve your flow. There's no such thing as magic. How you work affects the outcome of your work. We teach you best practices that your team can use every day.

Our Tools

The right selection of tools and services allow us to build you engaging sites quickly and reliably.

Ruby on Rails

Gives us the power to build features that are reliable, testable, and able to grow.

React

Allows to build high performing interactive interfaces that engage users.

Heroku

A powerful platform for keeping our apps online, fast, and scalable with minimum investment. Wizard's open source Heroku tools allow us to keep complex operations simple.

Featured Client

Josh Nicholson was researching cancer at one of the more notable labs in Virginia and he had a problem. It wasn't the research itself that was giving him issues, it was publishing processes he needed to follow to get his research reviewed by his fellow scientists. Peer review can be a lengthy and expensive process, and there is no guarantee of publishing in the end. Research is hard enough and these aren't issues scientists should have to deal with. Josh decided to do something about it.

Learn How The Winnower got off the ground.

In order to cure cancer, we first need to cure cancer research. - Joshua Nicholson, Founder

Client Profiles

Our Team

Francis Gulotta

Francis is a long time developer and technologist. He's run development teams for hedge funds, tech startups, and private education. He loves teaching, javascript and robots, has recently spoken at JSConf Brazil, jQuery Conf UK and JS Conf US and runs Nodebots NYC

Amy Gimma

Amy is a web developer with a variety of experiences in other industries, including healthcare, recreation, and public services. She likes to use technology to help businesses connect with their customers. In her spare time you'll find her developing her programming skills, riding her bike, or rock climbing.

Armando Amador

Armando is a hybrid designer/developer with a precision and attention to detail that reflect his love for effective and engaging design. Before becoming a developer, he worked for the iconic Ebony Magazine as a Web Producer and at VIBE Magazine as a Marketing designer. When not designing or developing, you can find him reading Japanese manga, wikipedia surfing or playing basketball.

Vico Zabel

Vico is Wizard's Design Director, specialized in interactive design and branding. He has been working for multiple startups and agencies where he had the opportunity to work on Converse, Nike, and MPDI projects. He founded his own consulting business in 2010. When not designing he is out and about with his black Lab Maggie.

Elijah Kim

Elijah is a soft spoken developer with a large passion for clean code. After studying math at college, web development was a natural transition aided by Metis. When he's not discovering crazy methods on Enums, he is either lost on the Rift or binging on a newly discovered sitcom.

Recent Articles

Ducktyping. Quack.

I was working on one of our projects when I happened to run across some code that set off my rubber ducky detector. It's a page that displays the days production quantities or displays an estimate if it's too early in the day to tell. Both cases have very similar Read More

Arranging Complex Factories (for fun and profit)

FactoryGirl the oddly named testing tool for database models is something we use a lot at Wizard Development. If you're unfamiliar with how it works, I strongly suggest you check it out. Unlike fixtures which loads a bunch of data into your database, factories will create the objects you need Read More

Noob to Wizard: The Journey

It's been around six months since I quit my job as a PSI Analyst. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, it's pretty much a glorified title for an Excel technician. I lasted a mere 3 months before the banal, repetitive tasks took their toll on me, slowly killing Read More

Armando Amador on PBS

A few weeks ago Armando was featured on PBS News Hour in a spot about education and software development. We couldn't be more proud. The segment covered software development bootcamps, specifically the Flatiron School and how people are using the education to get jobs. Our spot covered Armando'... Read More

The Winnower API

We recently added an API to The Winnower to support our new Wordpress Plugin. It was a great experience in both product and software design. Wordpress support is the first of a few great features we're adding to The Winnower to aid our users in publishing. It was suprising to Read More

Cleaning up your views with Simple Delegators

While working on my pet project for matching tennis partners I decided to make a match history page. It displays a player's recent matches and some information pertaining to them: who played when, who won, and how much that win affected their score on the site. I also wanted each Read More