Agile software engineering for financial services…

Finsignia is a small collective of experienced software managers, architects and developers who have successfully managed, led, delivered and supported production-quality and scalable software to technology startups and financial services firms.

• 

  Ruby

  A dynamic object-oriented programming language with a purist twist similar to Smalltalk. In addition to a purist OO approach, Ruby also offers many metaprogramming (aka Ruby magic) facilities not available in other popular languages like Java and C#. Finsignia has mastered Ruby magic and idioms to be able to harness the full power of Ruby. Hire the real experts (Finsignia), not just the consulting firm that has the snazziest marketing team or buzz word usage!

• 

  Ruby on Rails

  A Model-View-Controller based web framework written in Ruby. When an agile engineering mindset is applied to using it, Ruby on Rails facilitates high velocity web engineering and development. As with all technologies, Ruby on Rails in the wrong hands (undisciplined web developers/designers) yields messy and inefficient codebases that usually become unweildy to maintain. Finsignia software engineers are highly disciplined and well-versed in potential pitfalls to avoid and know how to take advantage of RoR best practices.

• 

  Erlang and OTP

  Erlang is a functional proramming language that is focused on highly concurrent environments (think parallel financial computations that take advantage of all processors and cores much better than most other environments). OTP is the Open Telephony Platform, which provides a framework for building highly distributed and fault tolerant systems (it doesn't need to be telephony related). Finsignia engineers see great potential of Erlang and we are using both Erlang and OTP in production for risk management applications.

• 

  Linux

  Linux is an open source operating system that has superceded UNIX for server-side applications. Linux has various distributions that are all built around the core of the Linux kernel and thousands of high quality open source services from Apache HTTPd, MySQL, PostgreSQL, bind, postfix, sendmail as well as many desktop-based applications for workstation deployments. Finsignia engineers on average have over 10 [ten] years Linux experience with Red Hat (RHEL, Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora) and non-Red Hat based distributions. All our engineers write server code on Linux workstations. Never trust developers that do not develop on the same platform as their deployment target OS.

• 

  MySQL

  A practical database with excellent support for many open source CMS projects, programming languages (Java, C#, Python, Ruby, C, C++, Perl, PHP, etc.) and many enterprise features such as replication. For 4 out of 5 cases, MySQL (community or enterprise editions) will work as well or better than Oracle, Sybase or other proprietary and costly databases. MySQL also has a large business (MySQL AB) that can provides enterprise support. Finsignia engineers have worked with a variety of database servers from MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Informix using Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP and C and have been most impressed with MySQL and PostgreSQL bindings and support.

• 

  PostgreSQL

  Originally an academic project at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, it is the oldest open source RDBMS product still in active development. PostgreSQL has had advanced features longer than MySQL and is competitive with MySQL in terms of performance as well as having excellent support for enterprise features including replication. At Finsignia we have worked with all major RDBMS vendors and found PostgreSQL provides unbeatable value for more advanced heavier weight RDBMS needs. Finsignia has helped clients migrate from Oracle or Sybase to PostgreSQL, usually providing three digit ROIs within months.

Finsignia delivers high quality software using agile practices. Applications built by Finsignia solve real world business problems for out financial services clients. Many of our clients come to us with business problems and let us determine what software stack will provide the most reliable, robust, scalable and productive solutions for their needs. However, we do work with clients that have explicit technical requirements as well.

Finsignia’s software development stack of choice is based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Linux/BSD/Solaris, Ruby, Ruby on Rails (or Merb), PostgreSQL (or MySQL), Git (or Subversion) and more. However, our pre-Ruby and pre-Ruby-on-Rails experience includes enterprise development in Java (JDK 1.2 to 6, J2EE, JEE/EJB3), Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Python, Django, TurboGears and related technologies and frameworks.

Links

• finsignia on GitHub
• Managed Open Source blog

© 2005-2009 Finsignia LLC. All rights reserved.