A Bootstrap World

Bootstrap makes us better.

You might have noticed some changes to the web site.  This week I pushed some changes into production and it reflects some of the newer technologies on the web.  We are now using MVC5 and Bootstrap web to provide a consistent experience for people using the website on a mobile device or web browser.  This week on the blog I want to talk about Bootstrap and how it fits in to our mission to provide web applications which work any time and any place.

I believe that I am a late adopter of Bootstrap.  The first open source version was released in 2011 and it became the most popular download in the GitHub development project in 2012.  I stumbled upon it in 2013 when I was about to change the careers.  Another developer had exposed me to it was some kind of revelation.  Now there was a way to build web sites which looked good on small browsers and that functioned well on full screens.  It was a revelation but it did not seem like something that would work with the Microsoft technologies I was working with.

This changed with the release of Visual Studio 2013 who used Bootstrap 3.0 as its default tool to manage the look and feel of web pages.  When I saw how easy it was to work with, I quickly became a convert.  Instead of noodling around with web pages and cascading style sheets, I had a built in tool to help build web applications which scaled from the mobile phone to the big screen.  It was also great that Microsoft included tools like LESS to create my own styles and to add tweaks to my layouts.

For you the consumer this is a big deal.  Now, you can rest assured that there is an industry standard way to make sure that your web site looks good on a small browser or on a giant screen.  In addition, your web applications will now work anywhere you have a connection to the web.  This gives you significant power managing your business processes because you can look up inventory on the phone, tablet or laptop with no major interruption of service.  This is the cloud based connectivity that we boast about.

All of us at E₃ systems are excited about this technology.  It is nice that the collective wisdom of the world wide web has embraced this approach and that just means that you the consumer now have an industry standard to measure progress against.  Contact us today and find out how we use Bootstrap to help you.

New technology is fun and using a new technology to solve a business problem is even more fun.  Bootstrap is one of those technologies which does both and you are going to see more of it as time passes. It is a bootstrap world and we are living in it.

Until next time.

The times and trends change

Always looking to the future

As a technology professional it is easy to get swallowed by the hyperbole and latest trends in technology.  While some ideas catch on like design patterns and object oriented design. Other trends look like ugly fads such as noSQL and Java Server Pages.  I am not immune to these trends but I tend to be much more pragmatic than the average developer regarding new technologies.  I suppose being in the development business for fifteen years does that to a person. This week on the blog I want to talk about keeping fresh as a technology professional.

Google posted an interesting statistic for technology professionals.  In 2001, a Gigabyte of storage cost roughly $10, today that same gigabyte costs ten cents.  In twelve years, the time from kindergarten to high school graduation the prince has fallen by an exponential amount.  In that same amount of time technology has changed dramatically.  When we founded E₃ systems we were excited about a new technology from Microsoft know as MS Tag.  Today the Microsoft tag technology is being discontinued and will disappear in 2015.  This is the inevitable march of progress and the invisible hand of the technology marketplace.

This puts technology companies and professionals in a difficult situation.  Keeping your technology skills up to date means making educated guesses about what trends to learn and which ones to ignore.  If you guess correctly you can make millions of dollars.  If you guess wrong you can wind up unemployed without any prospects.  So what is a company or professional to do faced with this reality? A professional or company concentrates on training.

A technology profession or company that does not focus on training is like a shark which cannot swim; it will drown and die.  As technologies come and go, training makes it possible to stay on top of what you need to know. This means to remain relevant a technology company or developer needs to update their skill set every eighteen months.

You see this progression at E3 systems as we moved from Microsoft.Net web forms to MVC4.  We have much cleaner data management with Entity Framework and code first than when we started using Advanced Data Objects .Net.  We are also migrating away from VB.NET to C#.  All of these moves are natural progressions and related to the technology needs of our potential customers.  We will continue to make these changes as necessary.

The most exciting of these trends is the growth of the mobile web and the user of technologies like HTML5, Knockout.js and CSS3 to build websites which look good on tablets, phones, and PC’s. I am proud of how we at E₃ systems have pioneered this approach to out applications.

Unlike many technology professionals, I have stayed alive in this business because I have kept my skills up to date and avoided the hyperbole and fads which plague this industry. It has also informed the products our company offers.  Drop us a line today and we can show you.

Until next time.

Is your business ready for the next SharkNado.

Are you ready for the Next SharkNado Attack

It you missed it last week of the biggest events on Twitter in a long time was the premier of the B-grade monster movie SharkNado on the SyFi channel.  As the title implies, it was a monster movie featuring man eating sharks which sucked up by a tornado and then dropped on the unsuspecting population of Los Angles.  News anchors from cable television, celebrities of all stripes, and political figures chimed it to remark how awful the film was.  It generated so much buzz that the network decided to rebroadcast the film early because the overwhelming demand.  There is a lesson here for any business person.  The web and social media can be a powerful thing creating demand for your business.  In this blog post, want to encourage you to be ready when the next SharkNado hits.

The universe of social media is composed of many services; Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit being the largest and most influential services on the web.  Facebook acts as a global community for everyone from your parents to people who are interested in dressing up as cats to go for contact.  According to Yahoo news, about 1.1 Billion people call Facebook the place they go to share information with friends and family.  Twitter is known as a micro-blogging service and users can only type 140 characters at a time.  What makes Twitter so popular is the speed of how information is shared and it is also relatively unfiltered so it is the tool of Occupy Wall Street and rebels in Turkey.  Rumors and misinformation swirl about but within this river of information are plenty of nuggets of information gold.  Watching Samuel L. Jackson root for team USA during the Olympics was extremely funny and I highly recommend Jack Tapper’s feed from CNN.  Finally, Reedit acts as a clearing house of blogs and photographs on the web. They also have an “Ask Me Anything” or A.M.A feature which has become the place for politicians and other thought leaders to try out new ideas.  For the sake of disclosure, I use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn as my social networks to promote this business.

So what does this mean to you a small or medium sized business? It means you also need a presence on social media web sites; at the very least Twitter and Facebook.  You can promote specials and talk about your business in an unfiltered manner.  If people like your content they will share your tweets and Facebook messages extending your reach.  It is also cheaper than advertising on radio, television, or newspaper.  This makes it a low cost means to promote your business.

We at E₃ systems understand this strange world and would like to help you.  We leverage Facebook and Twitter and can show you how to do the same.  Please contact us and we will show you how.  So the next time a SharkNado hits you will be able to use it to boost your business.

Until next time.

Zombie Proof your Business

Zombies are coming,  is your business ready?

This week Brad Pitt is putting his money and reputation on the line with the release of his blockbuster production World War Z.   I have been reading the book in anticipation of the movie and I am looking forward how they are going to transform Max Brooks’ book into popular entertainment.  While I was reading along, it struck me that a great deal wisdom can be gleaned from a fictional zombie apocalypse. As a small business person the unforeseen and the unexpected happen all the time. If you are not careful your business can wind up like the walking dead.  In this post, I want to talk about how cloud based services and changes in the technology sphere can help you avoid this tragic fate.

The biggest challenge for any business is how to deal with disaster recovery.  If a fire, earthquake or flood hits your business how are you going to get back up and running.  Larger companies have decided that they are going to create large data centers resembling Fort Knox.  Massive Batteries, multiple generators, and numerous systems are in place.  In fact these facilities are filled with backups and redundancies that the only way to really stop business is the have an asteroid directly strike the building or a massive civil disruption, like a zombie apocalypse, to shut down the entire power grid.

As a software developer at the turn of the century, I though all these precautions were an over-reaction.   My opinion changed overnight in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the world trade center.  Merrill Lynch lost four employees to the attacks but the terrorist nearly destroyed the company causing it loose over $98 million in the course of a tragic morning.  Data-centers and disaster recover became a very serious business. No one anticipated the terrorists flying a plane into the building with your data but now it was a very real possibility.

Over the last decade, as data centers grew they had surplus space and power.  Being good capitalists, these companies began leasing out their extra space to smaller companies.  Cloud computing was born.  Soon companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft got into the act and became the principle suppliers of cloud services.  Prices fell and up-time increased.  This was technology and the marketplace doing what Adam Smith said it would.

As a small business myself for a few hundred dollars a year I have the computing power which would have cost several hundred thousand dollars during the giddy days of the dot-com boom.  It allows me to stay in business as I look for customers.  I also know that my data is secure because it exists in a data-center in the Pacific Northwest and that if something happens to me or my business, like a zombie attack, the survivors will be able to access the data and information with a few passwords.  You can have this security too.  At E₃ systems we have inventory management and fleet management software safely hidden away on the cloud for you to use so if something happens to your facility you will be ready to do business the next day.

Contact us today and we will show you how this is more exciting than a zombie apocalypse.

Until next time.