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Fractional CTOs Accelerate Your Innovation

By |2020-08-05T18:42:21+00:00August 4th, 2020|

Fractional CTOs bring innovation to your company and experience to your software development and architecture teams. Companies that rely on technology to be competitive make a common mistake. They wait for their development teams to come up to speed on new technologies, methodologies, and processes. There is an assumption that the way to bring in new technologies is to brute force through the learning curve and gain the necessary experience one day at a time. Regrettably, competitive business environments don't wait for "one day at a time". This approach brings about management agitation due to missed market opportunities, slipping deadlines, increased production issues, and frustration with the team. This happens consistently with the [...]

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Stop Doing Time & Materials Consulting Agreements

By |2022-07-26T02:10:32+00:00July 27th, 2020|

Most consulting firms do their statement of work and their projects on a per hour basis. They tell you how many hours they think the project will take, a blended set of rates and that they will do demos every two weeks so you stay on the same page. That all seems fine until you start thinking about what you, as the customer, are paying for. You are paying for hours, not deliverables. It seems wrong on many levels. Primarily, it is wrong because both the consulting firm and your organization will spend the next few months discussing (arguing) the hours being billed. All the while, the team back at the consulting firm [...]

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Releasing software is scary

By |2020-06-27T13:19:52+00:00June 7th, 2020|

You're getting ready to roll out an exciting update to your company's 10 year old web-based application. You've convinced your management chain that these enhancements will vastly improve the user experience and make your call center reps much more productive. It's Saturday night, your dev team is on the conference call to support the install, and you're getting ready to click the "deploy" button. Just before you do, a thought rolls through your head as you contemplate the 523 commits, 6000 hours of development, and 2000 hours of QA time that went into this project. What's Worst Thing That Could Happen? Well, the worst thing that could happen is not what you think it is. It's [...]

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I Have a Great Idea for an App

By |2020-06-27T13:17:03+00:00May 28th, 2020|

As a person in technology, how many times have you had someone tell you that they have a great idea for a new app? Okay, it isn't always an app. Sometimes it is a web platform, a new idea for using ML/AI or a new hardware device. It can pretty much be anything that is based on an idea that relies on technology to solve a problem. I have had a number of those conversations over time. A conversation that centers around a great idea for a mobile app speaks more to our aspirations to build something that can turn into quick money. It is almost like buying lottery tickets. You have this [...]

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Data Pipelines with Apache Nifi

By |2020-05-14T17:39:36+00:00May 14th, 2020|

Data Pipelines with Apache Nifi Quickly moving new data sources into a Big Data environment is one of the challenges we hear about most from our clients. It's one thing to write some code that gets data from an API and then move it into the data environment, it's another to make it an operational process that the end user (the business) can rely on. This article will look at considerations and lessons learned for using one of Twisted Pair Labs' favorite heavy lifters in this problem space, Apache Nifi. What is Apache Nifi? Apache Nifi is an open source project originally developed by the NSA to manage very large streams of data. [...]

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What does a digital signature actually mean?

By |2020-05-08T14:49:24+00:00May 5th, 2020|

  Have you ever signed a document digitally, as in via your computer, and assumed that the hand drawn or typed version of your name you placed on the document was your "digital signature"?  Read on to learn (some of) the details in the closest thing to human terms that I can provide. Note: This is Not a "White Paper" If you are a hardcore computer scientist, a cryptologist, or understand what PKCS stands for without clicking this link you will want to skip this one because I'm not going to spend time drawing out all of the finer points of an "SSL handshake" vs the infinite ways that cryptography is used in [...]

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Knowledge Walked Out The Door

By |2020-05-08T15:04:29+00:00May 4th, 2020|

  Process Knowledge Is An Asset Have you ever watched a talented coworker walk out the door on their last day at your company and felt like a lot of knowledge was walking out with them?  That's the feeling I had recently when a key employee at one of our clients finished her last day.  She was bright, talented, connected inside and outside of the business, and integral to a complex and critical part of our client's organization.  The queasy feeling that came over me as we said goodbye was that nobody knew exactly how she did what she did.  They knew the work product that she produced and the benefits of her [...]

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“Am I gonna see you guys again?” : DISPELLING MYTHS IN DEV

By |2020-04-21T17:19:16+00:00April 20th, 2020|

“Am I gonna see you guys again?” Dispelling Myths In Dev This week, I was wrapping up a meeting with a potential client, taking time to help this person understand the in’s and out’s of our development process at Twisted Pair Labs, when he says, albeit somewhat sarcastically, “So...am I gonna see you guys again?” A valid question, given that many firms will sell you on their expertise and then hand the project off to their less experienced colleagues. We have our first myth to dispel in the realm of software development.MYTH 1: Software development agency reps ghost you once they hook you on for a project.It’s frustrating to a client to feel [...]

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