Recent Projects

Our client was creating a fun and educational experience to teach teens to think realistically about money and encourage  financial responsibility. They were building it using the tools they were comfortable with, Flash, Javascript, and dynamic HTML. Trouble, was the deployment platform was SharePoint.

We empowered them to use the tools they were comfortable and productive with by creating a simple RESTFUL web service allowing for the storage of arbitrary application data in a SQL server database. We basically created a nosql datastore accessible via simple http calls passing JSON. The result was the client accomplished their goal significantly faster and less expensively than they thought.

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I offered to help a development partner out on a pet project: Wondervault, a site for collectors. I did this primarily to sharpen my Django skills.  In retrospect, I'm surprised at how much basic functionality had to be coded from scratch, things like supporting the signup and login process, ratings, comments, etc, etc.

Since then I've discovered pinax, a platform that sits on top of Django and provides the above features and more. It is now my go to architecture for a certain class of web site.  I would call it the ideal tool for building social networks, though the creators say it's not just for that.

Our client is a startup that handles outsourced clinical study management.  They need to commit to an ongoing development effort to succeed. Yet it is difficult for a small startup to spend what it takes to build the complex systems they require using traditional development methods.  We are helping them to grow their business by relying on SharePoint technologies which has reduced development costs by 75%.

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Our development partner needed to create a sophisticated, highly branded and meticulously designed intranet portal for their client. While, Micrsoft SharePoint 2007 is an ideal platform for a sophisticated portal/intranet, it is notoriously difficult to skin and brand precisely, and falls short as a CMS for creating and managing user created content. SP 2007 does a lot, but it's not always pretty!

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We adopted a complex java application that made this on-line publication go, after it was orphaned by the original developers and let go to seed. We enabled our partner to service an important client while bringing an unruly code-base under control.

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A leading reinsurance company utilizes sophisticated catastrophe management software to  analyze the property risk represented by client insurance  portfolios.   What  this  third party software doesn't do is to grade the quality of the data it processes. This left our client exposed to losses stemming from portfolios  whose risk could not be properly assessed.

Again we designed a domain specific language, using spring.net, Visual Basic and MS SQL Server, for grading the quality of insurance portfolio datasets. Our application scores datasets by looking for suspicious records: incompletely specified ones and ones containing default  or nonsensical values.  The scoring rules are encoded in an xml based domain specific language allowing  our client's employees  to  transform, extend, and create analysis  without the need for additional programming.

Out client is an innovative pureplay internet company that lets artists and labels distribute music directly to on-line retailers such as iTunes, Sony Connect, Napster (with more and more to come).

Our client needed to do with away with the excessive time and effort required to integrate their  system with different retailers and wanted a way to bring new retailers online with minimal effort.

We used test first development and  the Spring and Hibernate frameworks to create a domain specific language for electronic music publishing.  As a result new retailers can often be brought online by deploying a single class with few dozen lines of code along with a Spring configuration file.

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