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About NPX Designs, Inc.

We are a small company based in Chicago, Illinois, providing software development, IT consulting, and scientific consulting services to clients and collaborators worldwide.

More Background

Values

  • Deliver systems which are powerful, functional, robust and beautifully made;
  • Communicate respectfully, thoroughly and skillfully;
  • Meet multiple project objectives concurrently and efficiently;
  • Quickly acquire new skills and adopt new approaches as appropriate;
  • Have fun doing all the above.

Current and Recent Clients

Approaches

  • Favor lightweight or “agile” methodologies for maximum results of the highest quality in the shortest time;
  • Work independently or closely networked to local or distributed team as required;
  • Timely responsiveness to changing requirements and the needs of both team and customer;
  • Emphasis on test-driven development, issue tracking and frequent iterative releases;
  • Continuous communication with clients/users to clarify requirements, strategies and issues.

Skill sets

  • Comfortable with multiple programming languages and environments; current favorites are Python and Clojure. We’re also big fans of the Django Web development framework.
  • Experience with cloud computing, in-house compute clusters, and supercomputing platforms
  • Automated deployments of test and production software (Fabric)
  • Linux kernel-level / device driver programming and embedded systems development;
  • Provide consulting on optimization of IT environments, including virtualization, cluster monitoring and configuration control
  • Front- and back-end Web technologies including MySQL, Django, HTML+CSS, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, and JQuery

Influences

  • Subramanian and Hunt, Agile Software Development. The best book we’ve seen so far about optimal processes of software development.
  • Edward Tufte’s beautiful books on visual communication of dense skeins of information, showing what works, what fails, and why.
  • Paul Graham’s essays on computer languages, which communicate the notion that programming languages vary substantially in expressiveness, and that whenever possible, one should choose the most powerful (expressive) language at one’s disposal.
  • Talks by Rich Hickey, who espouses ruthless simplicity and careful thought before moving to code (“Hammock-driven development”).
  • 37 signals, Getting Real. Focused on Web development, this book provides indispensible suggestions for small teams using lightweight processes to do user-focused development.
  • Rich Gold, The Plenitude. A wonderful book on the joys and perils of creating (engineering). “We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in.”