Tag: Customer Spotlight

Ignas Stancikas is a Lithuanian architect making waves in the USA and beyond with his bespoke architectural service, Truoba.

Truoba focuses on designing custom homes grounded in Ignas’ vision of presenting traditional Lithuanian design concepts for a contemporary market. Customers choose a predesigned house plan from Truoba’s website and can then customize it. 

The concept was born during Ignas’ time studying architecture in Glasgow, Scotland. “Alongside studying, I wanted to develop my portfolio. That said, I wanted my concepts to be built, not just drawn up.” So Ignas spent his summer holidays in his native Lithuania, working on small architecture designs and offering them to local real estate agents, home developers, and builders. 

Taking From Tradition 

Ignas began designing in Lithuania, a relatively small market with the construction industry routinely keeping with the status quo. During this time, he researched and analyzed homes built in the USA, which led to him founding Truoba there. 

In Lithuanian, Truoba means a traditional Lithuanian house. This design will slowly become extinct over the next thirty years as such homes are demolished and replaced by new builds. Truoba’s goal is to preserve traditional Lithuanian housing by translating the design to meet current living needs. 

“Lithuanian housing is distinctive because the homes are decorated with traditional Lithuanian patterns – you can find them on buildings as well as folk costumes. We believe the modern minimalistic style has become too empty and dull. Modernism, in some cases, lacks detail. So Truoba designs modern houses that are more detailed in a distinctive way – the same way a traditional Lithuanian house would feature folk geometry as decoration.“

A Move in the Market

Moving to the American market meant shifting perspectives in both the construction and website industries. The designs of houses built today in the USA are the same as 100 years ago, based on architectural styles such as Colonial, Craftsman, Cottage, and Mid-century modern. 

Architects design only 2% of new houses. General contractors take care of the rest. Their portfolios usually contain 15-20 homes that they keep building over and over throughout the years. Truoba offers a different foot forward. 

“There is a large niche once you understand how the construction industry works in the USA. In 2019, 800,000 homes were built here. I spent a lot of time analyzing houses built in the US.” Over three months, Ignas traveled across 17 states by car, visiting suburbs in each city and town to identify the ways in which he could improve the market.  

Home Is Where the Heart Is

Truoba’s strength lies in its website design. It provides the customer with a vision before they commit to the purchase. This online interaction lets customers be creative and eliminates the disconnect between their desired project and the end result, an issue that is common when working with local architects.

“We do what we do because we simply want to make peoples’ lives better. We do so by offering good designs and functional houses that can be built without wasting too many materials on unnecessary features. Shelter is a basic human need, and everyone needs to have a home. 

“Life can improve depending on the living environment. For example, your mood may improve just by having a higher ceiling with upper windows from all sides that could capture the sun from different directions throughout the day. Architecture has a great power to shape our life quality, and that drives us toward better results.

“The most exciting project is always the next one. My heart belongs to the project that I work on at a given time. I love coming up with a house design that people would like and decide to build.” 

Creativity Online

Truoba’s current website – Ignas developed it himself – is an extension of its original format built on WordPress. It was initially hosted by a different provider, but Ignas is happy that he made the switch to Hostinger: “I’m not an IT guy. Having been with Hostinger for around three years, I am relieved that I have everything from a strong website design, an intuitive hosting interface, great servers based in America, and beyond brilliant customer support that cares.”

Truoba’s website is more than just a service that lets the clients play around with the design of their buildings. It is essential to the business’s branding, too. For example, when Ignas found out that the pronunciation of Truoba was interpreted differently depending on the geographical location, properly-applied SEO techniques made the brand globally recognizable online.

“The name ‘Truoba’ will bring difficulties for people who speak other languages. But this is a case when a business has to follow the main vision. The mispronunciation issue can be solved by SEO as our business can be found online on search engines such as Google. Whether they pronounce it ‘Truba,’ ‘Trouba,’ or ‘Troba’, with the help of SEO, people can still find the website. ” 

Dreaming Up Reality

Truoba’s success is measured by the number of happy families they’ve helped build their dream homes. “Clients send us emails and photos of the built houses, and it is heartwarming to hear all the good things they mention about living in them. For many, these homes are something they’ve been dreaming of for a long time. Great outcomes and emotions are the biggest driving force to keep improving our skills.”

Looking back on the forming years of Truoba, Ignas ponders over the highs and lows of following your dreams. “If you want to start a business just to make money, don’t start. Most businesses don’t turn a profit for some time – this could be half a year or more. So find a purpose for yourself and your business. A vision of how you could help others, improve on existing things, or do the same old in a new way will help you overcome any hardships.”

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Notepad++ founder’s award-winning open-source text and code editor has been downloaded over 28 million times.

In 1999, Don Ho, a computer science student at the University of Paris, heard about the Free Software Foundation (FSF) movement.

It suggested that software would work better if the code were accessible to the people that used it. Developers would be able to build programs around their own needs without getting caught up in copyright infringements. To achieve this, FSF came up with the GNU General Public License (GPL). 

The idea stuck, and in 2003, as a young developer working for another company, Don developed a prototype source code editor written in C++ to substitute the Java-based tool the company was using that was underperforming. He did what any FSF-minded developer would do and proposed the prototype to his boss as a way to sidestep the problems he saw.

The proposal was refused. Don continued to work on the prototype, and on the 25th of November 2003, he made it available on Sourceforge as Notepad++. Nearly twenty years later, it is one of the world’s most popular source-code editors and boasts around eighty thousand daily downloads.

Needs-Based Innovation

The issues with the old editor the company was using were not just related to the limitations of Java. It also lacked the functionality that Don wanted in a genuinely needs-based source code editor.

The ideas that set Notepad++ apart at the time might sound obvious now. Still, features like autosave, tabbing, and find & replace – elements that make a developer’s job so much easier were not commonplace at the time.

Inspired by the FSF, Notepad++ has been open-source since day one. Still, Notepad++ is not just an open-source project but, more specifically, “free software,” which gives people the legal right and freedom to modify the code.

Allowing the community into the creative process has driven the program’s success, and in 2011, the influential blog Lifehacker crowned Notepad++ as “The Best Programming Text Editor for Windows.”

Developing an Open-source Mentality

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is the ethos Don follows as he develops Notepad++. Still, since Notepad++ has so many features, the biggest challenge is ensuring top-class functionality while keeping the editor simple for use.

The only solution is to let the community decide which features they like and don’t by allowing them to edit the program. 

It’s one of Don’s core beliefs. The idea that he can’t do whatever he wants is challenging, but his belief in the open-source mentality always wins out in the end. It reminds him that responding to the community is best for the project and the only way to keep complex ideas on track.

That belief would be vindicated in 2014, when Lifehacker proclaimed Notepad++ the “Most Popular Text Editor,” as evidenced by the sheer size of its dedicated community of developers and the efficiency and simplicity of its creative model.

Contributions to Notepad++ are centralized on GitHub. Coders fix bugs or implement features with pull requests; Don then accepts or rejects them. And that’s how the community refines the product and guides the project in the right direction.

It’s a model that has worked cleanly over the years, and Don stands by its success. He believes that open source is the most efficient method for software development, and he’s confident that in the future, there will be more and more open-source projects, especially for commercial use.

By the Community, for the Community

For Don, the time commitment to developing Notepad++ has always been the most challenging aspect. As always, the answer to his and Notepad++’s problems lay within the developer community.

“Without the Notepad++ community, it wouldn’t have become what it is today,” he says. Having spent a lot of time with the people involved, he realized that the project was not manageable by one person alone. So, instead of controlling the community, Don prefers to guide it by providing the infrastructure and workflow that allows it to manage itself.

As for keeping every user and contributor happy? “Well, it’s impossible,” he says, “but at least I do my best.” His best, however, is an exceptional standard. Today, Notepad++ supports 78 coding languages and has been downloaded over 28 million times. 

Now, after two decades, Notepad++ is still completely free and one of the best source code editors available online. 

Hosting and Distributing World Beating Software

Notepad++, like VLC, GIMP, or Audacity, has become a staple of the open-source software movement and is known for offering high-quality performance for free. Distributing the world’s most popular text editor requires a reliable, highly flexible, and, most importantly, secure central location. 

Sourceforge, the original place to access Notepad++, had been repeatedly compromised.

To avoid running the risk of both real and reputational damage to the Notepad++ project, Don decided that the only answer to his problem was to build a website of his own.

In the beginning, friends took care of hosting the website, but in 2019 Don moved the website to Hostinger. “I tried some hosts and found that Hostinger is the most featured, ergonomic, and affordable.”

It stands as a testament to the lightweight nature of Notepad++ that a website supporting software as popular as Notepad++ runs perfectly on Hostinger’s Business Shared plan. And he is sure that the move to Hostinger was the right one for his project. “The features of Hostinger are rich, the technical support is proactive and efficient, and the stability is amazing. Once the website is set up, it works like a charm.”

With the right distribution platform, supported by the right hosting, and a committed community, Don has slowly learned to let go of his desire to control the process from start to finish, trust in the developers, and enjoy coding an excellent product for himself and everyone around the world.

His advice: “You don’t need to have the ambition to make your project popular or successful; just enjoy it. That way, your project could be a success, but even if it isn’t, at least you’ll have fun and get to enjoy the most interesting part – coding and managing open-source software.”

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