ABOUT BRAINTAPPER

Braintapper Knowledge Solutions, Inc. is a consultancy based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that delivers business solutions from Cognos, Pentaho and other vendors.

Braintapper was founded by Steven Ng to provide comprehensive services around corporate information, knowledge (capture and sharing) and decision making. The core of our services are in data warehouses, analysis and reporting. For more information about our services, please visit our consulting page.

SOLUTIONS BEFORE SOFTWARE

By being vendor agnostic, we have absolutely no vested interest in selling you software licenses. It doesn't matter whether you want to go with a commercial solution like Cognos or MicroStrategy, or if you opt for an open source solution like Pentaho or Jitterbit. What does matter is that you choose a solution that meets your needs, today and tomorrow.

PROCESS

If your company already has a development process, you can skip this section, since we will always follow our clients' internal processes before using our own, unless directed otherwise.

For our own process, we use a process that we like to call the "Waterflow".

In our experience, standard Waterfall projects have problems with process overhead, continuous feedback and progress visibility.

Agile projects can be no picnic either, as the lack of a base set of requirements and "push it to the backlog" cop-outs make it difficult to keep the project on track.

What we've found is that if your team is populated with seasoned pros, a waterfall timeline with an iterative development phase (i.e., the "flow" in the Waterflow) can be extremely effective.

This way you don't lose the linear structure of the Waterfall, but you also get the progress visibility and continuous feedback of an agile process. Because your team is populated with pros, less time is spent on process overhead as well.

We'll elaborate on this process in greater detail in the Braintapper Blog.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

No matter what profession you're in, the gear matters, because it allows you to do your job well. If you're shopping around for a consulting firm right now, ask the other guys what they're using. If you get a blank stare, you might want to drop them off your short list.

So what does this mean to you? Having the right tools for the right task reduces development time, and time saved means money saved. We've provided a list of tools below that we use to reduce development and testing time.

You'll notice that many of the tools below are free open source software. This is deliberate - many of our customers don't have budget for expensive, narrow-use software, so we like to have a list of tools that makes it easy for them to have access to top-notch tools without heavy licensing burdens.

We use Fogbugz (funny name, killer product) for all things project-related, whether it be project documentation, task management or issue tracking. We've used a lot of tools, and this one is definitely one of the best around.

For version control of all our source code and documentation, we use Subversion, which we like a lot. Yes, the source control marketplace has gotten pretty competitive lately, but we have found that Subversion works well for what we do.

For root cause analysis at the database level (and general querying), we like DBVisualizer, because it's cheap, effective and runs on just about every platform you can think of.

For database modeling, we use Power Architect and MySQL Workbench for MySQL databases. For the record, we also like Embarcadero's ERStudio and CA's ERWin, but the price of Power Architect and MySQL Workbench just can't be beat.

For regular expressions testing and validation, RegExr has been indispensable for us.

For XSLT testing and validation, TestXslt is excellent, albeit a little dated.

For client development and environment testing, we use VMWare Fusion for the Mac, which enables us to run just about any x86 based operating system.

For on-the-fly data capture, we use Shovebox and Evernote.

For our internal knowledge systems (yes, Virginia, we eat our own dogfood), we use MySQL and Pentaho Data Integration, because they're robust, and to be 100% honest, the price is very nice.

For custom web development, we absolutely love the CodeIgniter MVC framework for PHP, because it takes so little time to get an application deployed. For actual coding, our IDE of choice is Coda on the Mac, and Notepad++ on Windows.

Finally, for documentation drafts, we use WriteRoom (Mac) and/or DarkRoom (Windows) to maintain focus. As these are plaintext editors, we write using the Markdown markup language before converting the documentation to a richer format.

No, we didn't get paid to mention any of the names above. We actually use these tools. Religiously.

 

ABOUT STEVEN NG

"If you fail to prepare, prepare to fail!" is one of the mantras that you'll hear Steven say if you spend even a few minutes working with him. As a true believer that planning and preparation are the keys to project success, Steven follows this philosophy in all of his projects at Braintapper.

A lifelong technology enthusiast (in other words, a "geek") with over 13 years of business experience, Steven has shifted his skills to the area of business intelligence over the past several years. Steven has designed and developed solutions for finance, production, sales, inventory and other areas.

With several years spent in application and web development, Steven has developed an interest in usability and the presentation of quantitative data. Steven is an advocate of Edward Tufte's philosophies of information presentation.

While technologically agnostic, Steven has focused his time on the Cognos and Pentaho business intelligence tools for the past few years. As a BI generalist, Steven can contribute to all aspects of a project, from project management, data modeling/ETL and report/cube development.

As a former technical writer, Steven has an aptitude for writing detailed project documentation. Steven loves a challenge and has a thirst for knowledge, especially in the area of technology. As a technology "maven", Steven is particularly adept at finding solutions to technical problems. His attention to detail combined with a broad set of technology experience has also served him especially well in the area of root cause analysis.

View Steven's Public Linked In Profile

ABOUT THIS SITE

A company web site should always represent the quality of your work, so we rolled our own.

In very much the same fashion as our business intelligence and knowledge management work, we strived to use best practices and adhere to the industry standards that we felt matter. In this case, we made sure that our code is W3C compliant.

There's a fine line between being a control freak and reinventing the wheel, so we take advantage of open source libraries wherever possible.

While the overall design is ours, the images are from iStockPhoto and the mini icons in the footer are from FamFamFam.

As should be the case with all great sites, we used a typographic grid as the foundation of our layout. In particular, we chose 960 grid .

Web Site

For this version (2.0) of the web site, we used a combination of PHP/CSS/Javascript to build the site (excluding the blog). JQuery is used to provide some interactivity (i.e., the carousel on the front page).

Content is managed with RapidWeaver.

Blog

For the blog, we created a custom PHP/CodeIgniter application to handle the content delivery and ensure that all links and permalinks from the previous Blogger implementation continued to work.

For source code blocks, we use Alex Gorbatchev's wonderful Syntax Highlighter script.

Content is managed with MarsEdit.