The articles here are about discoveries made, lessons learned, and topics explored. Were there enough time there would be much more. So as time allows, there is an inconsistent cadence of new articles. But the objective is the same, to share working solutions or a point of view that may help others.

A story of why

Information can be so easily found by search engine that you (and I) may question the value of writing more about anything. But then a funny thing happened.

I had a Kerberos problem and searched using the messages and details I had at hand. One of the search results looked promising, only to discover that I’d written the post (here) about the very problem I had (again). I had solved the problem, posted and forgot enough about it to discover in the future a solution I’d already written about.

Search engines miss a lot. There are unique paths to problems the don’t score well. Some content is behind subscriptions. Other content is either practically inaccessible or just lost. However, even in cases where a single search and click provides answers, finding those answer again is not assured. If I am the constant in these problems, then my own record of the solutions is more probably of use than might be initially apparent.

Technology is a modern requirement

Technology and the global market economy are deeply interdependent. Technology and innovation are the source of gains in productivity for economic growth. There is no steady state in the economy and so there is always demand for new technology. Simply, economic growth demands technology growth. Success for people, companies, and nations is largely dependent on their ability to innovate.

About Triskelion, LLC

The company was founded to build an E-Commerce site for Strand Book Store. There were subsequent periods of contract work under the Triskelion, LLC banner and staff positions. Work includes software development, system design, team and product management, system and network administration. With work in retail books, program trading, social media, fin-tech, internet MSO, grass roots action and engagement.

Software development since 2016 has been entirely with Elixir and the great flexibility and productivity it provides. We support the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation and the objective of building the next generation of advanced, reliable, realtime applications.

More about what Triskelion offers.

Work History

Cinemagram

We built the mobile cinemagram editor and short form video social media platform Cinemagram for Android and iPhone. This was the original short form video social media app. Unfortunately twitter ate our lunch with Vine which forced us to pivot. We launched Yeti Campus Stories. It did succumb to the moderation problem at which point we started working on machine learning approaches to the problem. This was 2016 and it really was ML, gradient descent and all. It was promising, but we ran out of runway.

At the end of this period I picked up Elixir and found answers that I had been looking for during the decade plus of work with Ruby.

exeq

I joined exeq in 2016. A fin-tech firm operating in New York and a full stack of Elixir, GraphQL, and React. The integration with plaid was the primary data feed integration. The Elixir team was about five and we were productive with Elixir. We didn’t get to that scaling event and run out of runway.

Strand Book Store

During multiple periods, work for Strand has been focused on building and supporting the E-commerce evolution of sites. Starting with PHP, graduating to Ruby, rebuilding in Elixir. Book selling is a unique and challenging retail business on all fronts. Integration with Basil for the brick and mortar part. Integration with Ingram for broader new content, metadata, and digital assets. In the current incarnation, bridging between a Magento front-end site and Basil processing multiple source catalog update streams and order/payment/shipping integration over RabbitMQ.

Breezeline

Starting in 2020, building an Elixir team from scratch to bring in-house new integrations. These included:

The core of these integrations leverage the reliability and distributed features of Elixir to tie together CSG technology used by the company via ENI and SLBOS to create flexible, responsive and real-time propagation of events and actions.

Extensive use of graphQL provided a consistent well documented data and operational boundary allowing front-end and back-end development to be independently productive.