The client here needed a DevOps engineer to come in and manage their systems, as well as build a solid DevOps team to support their expanding set of applications and microservices.

A non-comprehensive list of notable services performed:

• Migration from Docker containers running on individual EC2 virtual machines to the AWS Fargate container orchestration service.
• CI/CD pipeline implementation for new projects, as well as maintenance and debugging of existing CI/CD pipelines.
• User access management across multiple services (AWS, servers, databases, Github, SaaS services, etc.)
• Infrastructure-as-code implementation for new infrastructure, including designing reusable modules for commonly-used architecture pieces.
• Network infrastructure management for microservice communications.
• Container support: providing base images, debugging build and runtime issues, managing underlying image storage infrastructure, and providing education to developers on effective container usage.
• Cloud cost reduction planning and implementation.
• CCPA compliance: data management and erasure.
• DNS management
• Individual server management: patching, firewall configuration, performance monitoring
• Comprehensive AWS environment monitoring and alerting framework implementation, including PagerDuty escalation when appropriate

This project is a good example of the breadth of possibilities available to provide DevOps support for your development teams and business.

EZpers is a custom CRM for PERS companies. Originally built for a single company to improve their operations, it proved so useful that it’s now being used by companies all over the US.

It handles just about everything that such companies need:

• Customer data entry
• Inventory tracking
• Invoicing and automated billing (ACH, Credit Card, and Medicaid claim submission)
• Call center integrations (pushing and pulling customer data updates)
• Email reminders for users and installers
• Reporting
  • Finances (paid and unpaid invoices, payment tracking, claim submission status)
  • Customer turnover
  • Alerting on unhandled work orders, past due invoices, and errors with call center integrations
• Automated document generation customized for individual customer records

Efficiency gains of 350% were reported for one company:

• The industry standard for PERS companies is that you need 1 office worker to manage every 500 customers.
• Using EZpers, Home Buddy, LLC. was able to downsize from 7 employees to 2 employees while still managing over 4800 customers.

Being part of the medical industry, PERS companies also have to pay attention to HIPPA regulations. EZpers handles all such sensitive information securely, keeping it encrypted and decrypting it only temporarily when required.

This project is an excellent example of just how much a piece of dedicated software can improve operations by providing a central source of information and automating repetitive actions.

More information can be found on the EZpers homepage.

LICA-MedMan is a SaaS for managed care facilities. It provides personalized care plan document generation as well as facility policy templates based on industry guidelines and standards.

Document generation is a streamlined process, allowing users to select medications assigned to a resident and generate multiple care plan documents for staff members to use when caring for that resident.

Each document has information about the selected medications, while also being customized to what is needed for that particular document (a nurse administering drugs vs a physician ordering the selected drugs and giving special instructions about their use). Additionally, if the generated documents need to be modified beyond what the system provides, they’re available in mulitple file formats for ease of manual editing by facility staff.

Facilities can sign up for a yearly subscription to the SaaS, being automatically locked out once their subscription period ends if they do not renew. The software allows multiple user logins to be created for each facility, allowing separate logins that can be managed and audited by facility IT personnel.

Projects like this can provide extreme time-savings to companies without requiring them to completely change all of their day-to-day processes to see those benefits.

Further information can be found at: https://www.licamedman.com

Torqueware is a piece of software used to support the operations of Altite Inc., a tool calibration company. It allows offline calibration data entry for a multitude of different tool types, verifies the data is within standard limits, and synchronizes that data to a central server where it can be immediately viewed by clients.

The key features here are:

• Offline data entry and storage, with eventual server synchronization. This allows technicans to perform their calibrations at any site, regardless of how remote and off-grid, and have their work be uploaded as soon as they have a wifi connection.
• Customized data gathering on an individual tool type basis (a pressure gauge measures differently than a torque wrench).
• Data validation for adherence to tolerance specifications. This helps ensure that even if a technican isn’t paying enough attention to a particular data point, the tool still gets calibrated properly.
• Automated calibration certificate generation and history. This is extremely important to prove that the tools in-use by a company are safe and adequately maintained throughout their service lifetime.

I was brought in on this project for maintenance and upgrades; I ended up touching every part of the codebase and implementing a number of significant upgrades to their systems, including a few longstanding hidden bugs that had escaped notice for years of active use.

BillMed was a micro-app that converted employee timesheet data into EDI medicaid claims files.

It was implemented for a company that provides services for individuals with developmental disabilities. Their staff would work with these individuals daily, and those hours could be billed to the state Medicaid program. However, regulatory requirements changed and instead of being able to bill out claims on a monthly basis they were required to bill on a weekly basis after services were performed.

Since the Medicaid program also had requirements for how much time could be billed for each client per day, per week, and per month, the result was a time-consuming process that was slowly killing the company because of how much money they were having to float and were going to lose if their claims weren’t submitted on time.

The solution was a straightforward web application that would import a CSV file exported from their timesheet software, process it to determine what hours it could bill for each customer based on what had already been billed for them within the regulated time windows, and then generate an EDI claims file that could be uploaded to the state Medicaid program for adjucation. It would also generate billing reports for administrative tracking.

This project is a good example of how a simple piece of software can save an enormous amount of time and improve cashflow for a company. In a very real sense, the company would have gone under in another 3 months if they hadn’t commissioned BillMed to streamline their operations in the face of regulatory changes.

This project was for an unnamed law firm that was having trouble getting leads from their website into their centralized leads SaaS.

The SaaS product had the ability to post leads directly into their system via API, but just embedding the API credentials into a form on the firm’s website would be insecure.

The solution? An intermediate service that takes the raw leads data from a form submission on their website, runs it against Google reCAPTCHA for validity, and then does the API posting server-side.

This helps prevent spam submissions while ensuring legitimate leads get passed along, all while protecting sensitive information in a way that the vendor themself was unwilling to devote resources to do.

Solutions like this show that even when your vendor doesn’t provide a particular implementation option, you can still often find a solution that gets you to where you want to be. You don’t need to re-invent an entire car just to change the wheels, you just need someone who knows what you need and how to do it. Software is no different.

The Data Firehose project was for a large technology firm that wanted to take proprietary data from their internal Kafka cluster and make it available to their clients on a real-time basis.

The final design we came up with was to have a filtering webhook subscription system. Each client was allowed to subscribe to as many topics (including duplicates) as they desired, and could apply a JSON Schema filter to each individual subscription.

This system provided the greatest amount of flexibility for the clients, as they could set up whatever internal systems they wanted to process the data and could also specify the specific data they were interested in receiving from the firehose.

The backend was handled by a dynamic set of worker nodes that the system automatically distributed the subscriptions to, allowing the system to scale up to a near-infinite number of webhook subscriptions.

This project is a good example of how we can take an internal set of data that your clients would be interested in and make it available to them as a service.