We’re a bunch of long-time designers and developers from agency, freelance and startup backgrounds. Caravan is a worker co-op, so every member is an owner. We bring this entrepreneurial spirit to all of our engagements, by design. Get in touch.

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We turn visions into working products. With tight-knit teams, iterative development and lots of love, we ship custom web applications that are a joy to use.

Our contribution

Favourite tools

Services!

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Stuff we're working on

Assembl

A debate app that helps build consensus from arguments. As opposed to normal online communities which can encourage disagreement and trolling, Assembl actually fosters the development of consensus and problem solving. We are taking care of all the product development and plan to offer it to small organizations to help them facilitate debates in their communities. This product is being developed in partnership with Imagination for People.

SportRFID

Video recording and sharing for extreme sports. Athletes stick RFID tags to their helmets which are detected by cameras as they approach jumps or special trick areas. Cameras record the performances from different angles. Athletes can then view and edit their videos from their smartphone, and share online. We are building the video publishing system that is installed locally at every resort and park, and are also creating the mobile applications for end users to interact with their performance videos both online and off. This product is developed in partnership with Ion8.

Tenscores

An AdWords optimization service. Google provides a quality score on keywords in campaigns to determine their relevance and cost. Unfortunately they don't provide any tools to optimize the score. Enter Tenscores. With Tenscores, keyword quality is aggregated over time and reported in useful ways to help optimize campaigns. We helped rearchitect the application, bringing the dashboard load time on large accounts from 10 minutes to under 1 second, and the background keyword aggregation tasks from hours to minutes.

Prana

Prana creates organic and vegan foods with the environment and their customers’ health in mind 100% of the time. Their products are ubiquitous in health stores and groceries in Montreal and can be found throughout Canada. We made their e-commerce and corporate sites. Buy some delicious nuts!

Tuktu

Tuktu is a classifieds startup by our very own Benoit Clennett-Sirois. He wants to take on the big guns like Craigslist and Kijiji by offering superior usability and a public API. The MVP was released in October 2012 and is iterating quickly based on user feedback.

Our members

Nicolas Cadou

Cofounder of Ajah, Nicolas is our resident "Gandalf". He has been programming longer than the rest of us and is consulted on pretty much everything architecture-related. He's into quietness, meditation, and somehow manages to carve out a super healthy work-life balance despite working a million hours a week. Nicolas has been dreaming of a web workers' paradise forever, so he jumped all over the founding of Caravan. Find him on LinkedIn.

Jonathan Poirier

Jo was previously the creative backbone at Le Site. He was behind just about all of their designs between 2007 and 2011. We generally think the word "rockstar" is a silly way to describe a regular Jo, but ours fits the bill. He rides an old Kawasaki bike and often sports variously coloured bandanas. He’s also not bad at the ukelele. The first thing he did with our awesome new office was throw a giant party. He also built all of our desks and tables with his bare lumberjack hands. Find him on LinkedIn and check out his personal portfolio.

Christopher Hart

Chris put together one of the first Python web teams in Montreal. Caravan is the third iteration of his vision for a low-hierarchy and high-awesomeness organizational structure. Chris is a generalist. He started out in BC programming routers and maintaining networks, moved to web development while studying liberal arts, and ended up getting into the business of teams after realizing there's only so much an individual can do. He ran the technology side of Le Site for a couple years and brought the core of that team to Caravan. A ruthless pragmatist and simplifier, Chris is a little too happy to explain how to un-complicate any given UX problem. Especially over a beer. Find him on LinkedIn.

Benoit Clennett-Sirois

Ben is from Reddit; or 4chan. He dreams in memes. Ben used to deliver vegan sandwiches for a living and at some point years back made a breakthrough into web development with Python. Since then he has built a bunch of successful e-commerce sites, and founded Caravan and Tuktu. In between chess battles with our other members and trips to Burger de Ville for steak, he fiendishly hacks on a beautiful TRS-80 Model 100. Ben will do anything for bacon. Find him on LinkedIn.

Adrian Ghizaru

Adrian lives in a computer and is good friends with software. Whenever he doesn’t write code, he thinks about how to write better code and, on rare occasions, he’ll write about thinking about writing better code. He got his Masters in Computer Science in an ivory tower, but he’s seen many different working environments since joining the real world. He worked on a variety of projects from e-commerce to advertising networks and startup products, and picked up a few tips along the way about what works and what doesn’t. Find him on LinkedIn and GitHub.

Janina Szkut

Janina is a part time runner and a full time techie. With a background in startups including Pressbooks, she is also a leader in the programming community and has been doing web development for years. Janina hosts public workshops for learning Python and presented for Montreal Girl Geeks on how to build a computer. She graduated from McGill in computer science and built some of the big features on McGill’s website. Find her on LinkedIn.

Mat Allen

This “Mat” we speak of is really an alter-ego of some space creature. A big fan and producer of psychedelic music, Mat is perfectly at home writing magical things with Ruby. He also knows JavaScript and Python and has wielded them with style on tons of web applications. Mat studied computer science at the University of New Brunswick and moved to Montreal for adventure and profit, finally settling in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive neighbourhood where he "belongs". Find him on LinkedIn.

Nicholas Asch

Nick did mechanical engineering at Concordia University and has a special place in his heart for Perl. He’s also done his fair share of Python apps. Since he was but a pip-squeak Nick has been doing social entrepreneurship. His Greenify Earth Foundation led him to be an early evangelist of recumbent biking around Montreal. Nick also developed Akindi, the long-awaited replacement for those archaic Scantron systems used by schools. He co-founded Gliph to fix the ugliness and limitations of online authentication. Nick currently lives in Portland, Oregon and plans to return to Montreal some day. Find him on LinkedIn.

Get in touch

Send an email to hi@caravan.coop

Visit our office at:

5333 Casgrain, #1204
Montreal, Quebec
Canada, H2T 1X3