Blog Posts

Lightning Talks

6/23/2017

On Tuesday (6/20/2017), the Leaf team gathered for a round of lightning talks given by Leaf employees. The format was as follows: Speakers had 5 minutes to present on whatever they wanted. No slide deck required.

Developer Ergonomics and
Repetitive Stress Injuries
Chris Chalfant shared what he's learned about developer Ergonomics and Repetitive Stress Injuries. Some top tips from discussion included finding a tool to force yourself to take breaks away from the computer, proper posture (feet flat on floor, arms making an L shape when typing, knees slightly below hips), and the importance of learning keyboard shorts rather than reaching for the mouse (VIM lovers everywhere rejoiced!).

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Welcome Screen - Raspberry PI
Andrew Kaczorek gave an overview of the new software used to drive the large LCD welcome screen in our office foyer, allowing Leaf to have a custom welcome message for visitors to our office while being easily updated by office staff. The entire solution is being driven by BizPlay and a Raspberry PI. The custom case was also 3D printed by Leaf's Scott Beardsley.

Mechanical Keyboard
Jimmy Briggs gave some insight into his passion for mechanical keyboards. Using a hands-on show-and-tell approach, he gave everyone a chance to experience the feel of a mechanical keyboard as well as the variety of switch types that are available out there.

Optimizing Unit Test Fixtures
Frederick Myers shared some of the tips that his team uses for optimizing unit tests fixtures for speed, navigation, and consistency.

"Strangify" - Slack and OpenCV
Mike Warren pulled back the curtain on "Strangify" -- our slack app that uses OpenCV to detect faces on images and replace them with pictures of our own infamous James S.

CoffeeBot - Raspberry PI
James Alexander had not one, but two lightning talks. The first was an overview of Coffee Bot, Leaf's in-house IoT hack to monitor our coffee usage. Using a scale and Raspberry PI, we track when coffee is made and poured with the output of various statistics going on to an RGB LED matrix display.

Python Tornado web framework
James' second talk was an overview of the Python Tornado web framework that James is evaluating for IndyPY Web Framework Shootout.

It was great for everyone to get together for fun as well as an opportunity to share and learn (and have some pizza).

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Agile at Leaf

5/16/2017

The original agile manifesto has been, by far, the most dominant force the past decade on how organizations and teams go about designing, building, and maintaining software systems. It provides a basis for which requirements, communication, and organization are built around. The manifesto has spawned a dizzying array of well defined methodologies and frameworks, each with their own set of rules, rituals, and practices. Scrum, SAFe, XP, Kanban, Lean, and on and on. These frameworks have their purpose and situations where they shine and provide value. They also have situations where they introduce too much complexity and rigor where at the end of the day, the answer to the question "Does this make us better?" is "No".

By: Frederick Myers

The manifesto

Answering the question "Does this make us better?" is fundamental at Leaf and why we subscribe to following the principles of the agile manifesto rather than adopting a single agile framework and apply it across the board.

Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Processes and tools should be there to serve a team, not the other way around. Tools are a support mechanism to facilitate organization and communication but at the end of the day, the relationships and skill of the of the people involved is what will generate success.
Value working software over comprehensive documentation. We believe that iteratively building software with frequent feedback loops will deliver software that meets the customer's needs more efficiently and with a better results. Developers should have the flexibility to experiment with new concepts. Stakeholders should have the ability to evolve their requirements through interaction with the software to help clarify their vision.
Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Ongoing collaboration between the development team and the customer supporting the iterative development of software and ensure development happens transparently and without surprises.
Value responding to change over following a plan. We need to be nimble to respond to shifting needs – be it technical, customer, or market driven.

Post Agile

By not adhering to a single framework, we are afforded the flexibility of picking what works best for us and the customer. We incorporate practices such as daily stand-ups, sprints, Kanban flow, deploy often, automation, and retrospectives. We are able to integrate with other customers that might be invested in more formal methodologies such as Scrum or SAFe. For customers who aren't invested (or don't care) about a software methodology, by working with them we can derive project practices that make sense for both the development team and the customer based upon everyone's needs and capacity. And sometimes, that can involve eschewing agile a bit and incorporating waterfall techniques.

Leaf (EST. 1987) - 30 Year Technology Retrospective

3/22/2017

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Leaf Software Solutions is proud to be celebrating our 30th anniversary providing technology solutions to our clients. With major changes happening on a constant basis, it is easy to lose sight at how much technology has grown over the course of multiple decades. We decided to take this opportunity to revisit some of the major shifts that have happened within our industry over the past 30 years, how Leaf has adapted to these changes, and trends we see emerging now in 2017.

By: Andrew Kaczorek and Chris Chalfant

The story of Joseph Graves Associates starts in the heyday of the original IBM PC. The PC AT shown above was driven by a 286 CPU that contained 134,000 transistors and performed an average of 2.66 million instructions per second. Compare this to a modern Intel i7 Haswell processor at 1.4 billion transistors that performs around 238,000 million instructions per second. That means that an average desktop computer is 90,000 times faster than the PCs used when Leaf began.

Matt Moberly - Internship 1997

From a project perspective, our company launched as the industry was shifting from centralized, mainframe-based computing to distributed PC-based computing. As the 80s rolled over to the 90s, employees at Joseph Graves Associates were providing services across a wide variety of client sizes ranging from accounting services, staff augmentation, and custom development.

The next major shift happened in the early to mid nineties as the Internet became widespread. When Leaf began, the standard for business communications was a 2400 baud modem. In 1995, a typical business might have a 1.5 megabit connection, 685 times faster than the modem. A standard internet connection of 1 gigabit today is 500,000 times faster than network speeds prevalent when Leaf was founded.

As the Internet became a household name, Leaf began providing web development services to adapt to the needs of its clients. Microsoft Visual Basic was a popular platform, and many of Leaf’s clients included traditional companies that were realizing the potential of the efficiencies gained by incorporating computers and networks into their everyday business processes.

2007 saw the release of the first smartphones from companies such as Blackberry and the Apple iPhone. Smartphones have changed many aspects of our business and personal communications. From a technology perspective, many of us are carrying around phones in our pocket that have roughly the processing power of a Cray supercomputer that filled an entire room in 1987.

As mobile and cloud technologies have matured in the past decade, Leaf has made this transition as well. Many of the large-scale custom development projects that Leaf undertakes contain elements of cloud and/or mobile development. We have active projects being built with single-page app (SPA) frameworks and cloud-native architectures using technologies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The variety of technologies in our portfolio is continuously growing, from Microsoft .NET to open-source technologies such as JavaScript, Ruby and Python.

Leaf has been around to participate in some amazing technology enhancements over the past 30 years. Many other industry shifts are underway, and we plan to post about them on Leaf's brand new technical blog.

Expect to see a wide variety of topics including: