TechAscent - Delightful Software Solutions
2018-12-03

Empowering Experts

You know more about your business and we know more about solving problems with computers. A lot of businesses struggle with technical risk; the challenges of implementing robust software can be overwhelming. Fundamentally, neither your expertise or ours, alone, suffices. Two heads are better than one.

Benefits abound for the application of computers to business; whether making simple things automatic, tedious or drudgerous tasks easier, or even opening up entirely new possibilities. Unfortunately, the task of codifying knowledge and practices from many areas in software remains difficult. Software developed by non-specialists is often brittle, difficult to maintain and expand, or plainly non-functional.

Here at TechAscent, we relish these challenges.

In our over 40 combined years of industry experience we have worked with a diverse set of clients. We have worked at small companies, large companies, consulting firms, and several startups. We have worked with business-owners, fashion experts, financiers, scientists, mathematicians, artists, and any number of great software people.

The most fruitful and gratifying of this work always involves working closely with experts in order to explore, understand, and empower them in their domain. We enjoy the chance to learn the nitty-gritty of a new area, and give experts an opportunity to accelerate themselves down their path. We have repeatedly seen the transformative power of pairing existing business expertise with our software skills.

Here are a few examples:

  • Simple made automatic: A teacher we worked with was using a system that involved copying and pasting a silly amount of teacher, question, and user identification data (long strings of gibberish) in order to submit grades for assignments. The system we built filled all this information automatically, with a single click on a link in an email.

  • Difficult/drudgerous tasks made easier: A team of fashionistas managed a shocking volume of data on trends with a labyrinthine 'system' of spreadsheets that forever cost them lost days of effort with its propensity for denormalization (identical tags with trivial spelling differences) and demand for repeated work. The system we built for them eliminated several classes of errors, and dramatically improved both their capacity for collaboration and their throughput.

  • Entirely new possibilities: A manufacturer we worked with was bottlenecked by every customer order needing input from an engineer. They had a model that the engineers would employ to derive the necessary number of widgets given some input details about the conditions where the widgets would be installed. We developed a web-based calculator system (using the manufacturer's existing model) that enabled customers to input the details and derive the number of widgets themselves. This literally uncorked the business.

A Bit More About Our Approach

We have developed, and continue to develop, a suite of high leverage software tools sufficient for application in a variety of domains. The suite includes specialized and sophisticated bits that enable powerful solutions like internet scale machine learning. For example we have one small codebase that scales to almost infinite throughput by leveraging cloud technology. At the other end of the spectrum we can quickly build cloud-based web applications that will give you a new perspective on your data.

We excel at rapid, iterative, stable development with an emphasis on web deployment and scalability of solutions. Your new ideas can often be integrated within hours or days of you proposing them, not in weeks or months. We have invested years exploring the space of available tools and technology to make sure that we can do these things extremely quickly, especially in systems with complex data management, modeling, or poorly understood solution spaces. We can go from nothing, or an idea, to a full blown internet scale solution. We aim for a smooth flow from initial design to first deployment to maintenance mode where the costs become more fixed and the use cases are stabilized.

Some of the technologies we have invested in include:

  • Rapid web deployment focusing on user experience, reliability, and data integrity. See something fast, iterate quickly, and never lose data.

  • Various cloud technologies specifically designed to scale fluidly, on demand, to as large as needed. Do not worry about processing terabytes of video or a massive surge in web traffic.

  • Data visualization for both static and interactive designs. We can help you explore your problem and build a system for operationalizing insights.

  • AI pipelines tailored towards rapid development and business applications. We focus on simple, powerful, and reliable machine learning technology that is data-source agnostic. Maybe your data is in a MySQL database, a Hadoop cluster, and your sales team has a few excel whizzes. We can handle it; we will build a system that can leverage it.

Our style of development is appropriate for a large range of use cases:

  • We work with non-technical founders looking to get their concepts to series A or series B stage while limiting their exposure to technical risk. For many entrepreneurs and small companies, we have found that technical risk meets or exceeds other forms of risk. We can eliminate technical risk from the equation leaving you to focus on financial or business challenges more aligned with your expertise.

  • We love helping small companies looking to grow by identifying and eliminating bottlenecks. We have helped different businesses accelerate various departments, from sales to engineering and beyond. We have invested considerable effort in developing simple modeling pipelines tailored to exactly this use case. We can use the ambient data already present in your organization to both gain insights about the past and make predictions about the future.

  • We can also help research teams inside larger organizations looking to better leverage computation in their work. We have the numerical computing and high performance computing backgrounds to offload your most intensive data processing components. We build bicycles for great minds.

Conclusion

Often when teams with expertise outside of software develop custom solutions, the development and management of what they build soaks a disproportionate amount of the time and thus cuts into the ROI of the result. Engage a team of experts to guide you through this space and avoid a lot of the pitfalls of modern, buzzword heavy tech. We make computers work for you instead of the other way around.


TechAscent empowers your experts.

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