Vector Search for the End Point Blog

2025-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

We’re excited to announce a new feature on the End Point Blog: AI-powered vector search.

Below the “Our Blog” header at the top of this page, there is a new search bar with two adjacent buttons: “Search” and “LLM Expanded Search.” If you click “Search” (or press Enter), your search will be fed directly to our vector search/similarity search engine. If you click “LLM Expanded Search” (or press Shift+Enter, Control+Enter, or Command+Enter on macOS) your query will first be expanded by an open-source LLM, then sent to the similarity search engine.

The LLM is trained to expand the query to include similar terms, keywords, etc., before sending it to the similarity search engine. For example, if I search S3, similarity search alone returns no results — there isn’t enough semantic information for vector search to make useful connections. However, an LLM can expand this to s3, simple storage service, amazon s3, object storage, cloud storage..., providing more anchor points for vector search to connect to results.

The model improves results fairly well, but it is still an experimental technology, so results will vary. In the S3 example, you could get posts which don’t directly relate to Amazon S3, but relate to cloud object storage, or you could not get some posts which have an exact match of S3 but not more semantic similarity.

You can read more about the technical side of vector search in our recent blog post.

Happy searching!

Announcing Our 30th Anniversary!

2025-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Today marks End Point’s 30th anniversary!

On this date in 1995, as the Internet boom was just beginning, Rick Peltzman and I started the company, diving into the new and fast-changing world of the web. Since then, End Point has worked with a wide range of clients, tackled complex challenges, built reliable, long-term solutions, and adapted to continual waves of technological change — most recently integrating AI technologies into our work. The dedication and talent of our team have made all the difference.

As we reflect on these 30 years, we’re grateful for the many clients, partners, and colleagues who have been part of our story. We look forward to continuing to learn, innovate, and create in the years ahead.

Client Mining: Growing Your Business Through Acquisition and Relationships

2025-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

What is Client Mining?

Client mining refers to acquiring new work from existing clients, but also refers to seeking and landing new clients. It involves three key components:

Client Acquisition — Bringing in new clients.
Relationship Maintenance — Keeping clients engaged and satisfied.
Mining New Work — Expanding business opportunities with existing clients.

Why It Matters

In the simplest terms, without clients there is no business. Strong client relationships foster long-term success and financial stability. But even the best relationships don’t last forever—there can be budget cuts, in-house hires, or changes in business structure. A healthy client acquisition pipeline helps your company maintain momentum and staffing levels.

Consulting income is typically project-based and can be intermittent. More clients help offset these pauses in work. Diversification is important: relying on a few large clients can lead to problems if one of them leaves. Additionally, new clients lead to new development opportunities and possibly new offerings or services. Like exercise, client acquisition helps keep your consulting company in shape!

Client Acquisition

Understanding Your Target Audience

Before acquiring clients, you must understand:

Your services — What strengths and expertise do you bring?
Your capacity — Do you have bandwidth for new clients?
Your ideal client — What industries, sizes, and technology stacks align with your expertise?

Many consultancies do not properly understand their own services, and simply attempt to “land” any clients, then “adapt” to that clients needs. This leads to misunderstandings, appearance of incompetence, and wasted communication efforts. You do need to “adapt” to your clients needs, but landing clients that match your skills leads to faster onboarding and immediate productivity.

Channels to Acquire New Clients

Once you define your ideal client, identify the best channels for acquisition:

Networking — Events, conferences, referrals.
Digital Marketing
- SEO & Website Optimization.
- Social Media (LinkedIn, X, Meta, etc.).
Strategic Partnerships — Collaborations with complementary businesses.
Acquisitions & Mergers — Buying companies that align with your strengths.

Again, focus on your company’s area of expertise, and synchronize to it. The world today is very segmented, and potential clients expect you to already understand at least the basics of their needs. In many cases you will be competing with specialized consultants that are very adept at the industry your potential client operates in. So you need to know your own company’s areas of strength, and how that will set you apart from competitors. Broad, grand statements about how you can increase returns or optimize operations alone will not cut it. You will need specific examples of how you have done this in the past, and how that applies to your current situation. Come prepared!

Proactive Strategies

Cold Outreach — Email marketing and cold calling (effective in some cases).
Personal Pitching — Attending events and making connections.
Free Consultations — Offering value-added initial engagements.
Referral Incentives — Offering discounts or finder’s fees for client introductions.

Relationship Maintenance

Keeping Clients Engaged

After acquiring a client, build a strong relationship by understanding their business needs. Proactively suggest solutions that benefit them. Monitor trade news and publications that align with the clients business. You should already be tracking relevant updates based on the industry, because you acquired this client by knowing their needs… right?

Remember, one reason clients need consultants is to help them in areas they may not be familiar with, or even recognize.

Don’t always wait for the client to request development work. Conversely, try to only recommend development that you know will prove fruitful. The reason for this is that if you start a project based on a targeted idea, that part of the project will be successful and very likely the client will request additional features. Where as if you propose a far-ranging project, it can be much harder to clearly demonstrate success. So don’t always try to sell “everything” at once. Deliver something solid, and it will provide its own growth potential.

Regular Communication

Stay in touch without being repetitive.
Time outreach based on their business cycle (don’t propose disruptive development in the middle of their busy season).
Ask about their challenges, listen to their answers, and offer insights.

Delivering Quality Work

Always deliver on time and exceed expectations.
Provide proactive solutions to problems before they arise.
Understand their budget and cash flow constraints.

Feedback Loops

Regularly request feedback.
Implement suggestions to show adaptability and commitment.

Mining New Work from Existing Clients

Understand Their Business Goals

Regularly discuss evolving needs and challenges.
Identify opportunities to provide additional services.

Introduce Add-Ons or Upsells

Offer services that align with client needs.
Focus on value rather than unnecessary sales.

Become a Trusted Partner

Show measurable benefits of new projects.
Share success stories and case studies.

Key Takeaways

Client Acquisition, Relationship Maintenance, and Mining form the foundation of sustainable business growth.
Building trust and providing value ensures long-term client loyalty.
Listen, adapt, and deliver — the clients you already have are your best path to growth.

The clients you already have are the ones most likely to grow your business—if you know how to listen, adapt, and deliver.

Introducing the End Point AI Portal for Our Customers

2025-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Today, End Point is opening up the End Point AI Portal for our customers to use. As a technology consulting company that gets in the trenches with our customers to integrate, manage, and support the information technology they need to operate and transform their businesses, we believe this is a great service for us to provide.

We are offering our AI Portal to our customers at no charge. The price is certainly right, so we think our customers are very much going to want to use it. 🙂

What’s in the Portal

End Point’s AI Portal provides an interface to interact with many different LLM AI chatbot services all in one place. It even gives users the ability to simultaneously submit queries and instructions to multiple LLMs and see their responses side by side.

Our Portal is a customized implementation of the Open WebUI AI interface and connects via APIs to various AI services. Because of this architecture, our analysis has shown that unless there is ongoing high-intensity usage, the cost per user will be very low — much lower than a typical end-user subscription to a single LLM provider. In the future we may implement an accounting system for the portal to pass usage costs onto our users, but our first priority is to get this capability into our clients’ hands as soon as possible to help them be early adopters of this transformative tech.

Our AI Portal connects to a range of proprietary AI-powered chatbots served up by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Grok, as well as to several open-source AI-powered chatbots hosted on servers in the United States. This includes the Deepseek R1 model developed in China that rocked the tech world with its release on January 20. It’s a remarkable model, but for businesses in the US having their chat histories stored on servers in China is generally not acceptable. Having the service hosted in the US helps address privacy concerns. We run the open-source models on our own servers and using third-party hosting providers such as together.ai and groq.com.

To provide a more coherent user experience, the Open WebUI interface maintains each user’s chat history and provides the ability to manage, share, and download them.

The portal has already helped End Point with internal projects such as experimenting with how best to process various data sets to make them useful for AI-powered applications. The portal hosts several RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) applications that make use of various LLMs to search and answer questions about End Point’s blog posts—we are working to identify the best solution, so results may vary. Please don’t give up on reading our blog just yet.

Below are screenshots of our AI Portal’s interface showing some of its features (click on the images to view at full size).

We require users to accept our AI portal’s standard Terms of Service to use the portal. Additionally, each AI-powered chatbot accessible through our portal has its own Terms of Service, to which we provide links for your reference. Our primary concern is whether the information users input into these chatbots might be used by providers for training or other purposes. We strive to avoid chatbots that engage in such practices, and as of the launch of our portal, we’re not aware of any chatbot providers that claim rights to user input data. However, it’s common for Terms of Service documents to include clauses allowing providers to modify their terms without prior notice, so we can’t guarantee ongoing compliance with our standards. Regardless, users should always exercise caution and good judgment when entering confidential information into any online service.

Why We Are Doing This

At End Point, we’ve built our reputation for almost 30 years by providing expert consulting, development, and systems support. As AI technology rapidly evolves, we see it as both an opportunity and a necessity to stay ahead—helping our customers integrate AI into their own systems while deepening our expertise in the field.

By opening up our Open WebUI Portal to customers at no charge, we’re reinforcing our commitment to innovation, transparency, value, and great customer service. We intend this not only to benefit our clients, but to highlight our ability to integrate AI-powered solutions into your business. We stand ready to help you enhance your existing workflows, products, and services—as well as to create entirely new, AI-powered applications.

AI use cases include:

User-facing enhancements
- Intelligent similarity search
- Recommendation systems
- AI-powered insights from your data
- Dynamic FAQ generation based on past inquiries
- Customer support chatbots
- Faster and smarter documentation creation
- You name it. The possibilities are endless!
AI-driven development & optimization
- System testing and automated quality assurance
- AI-assisted code reviews and refactoring
- Automated code generation for improved efficiency
- …and more

We’re also using AI to refine our own processes, improve our code, and enhance the value we deliver to our customers. This initiative is part of our commitment to ensure that our clients continue to benefit from the best technology solutions available.

How to Get an Account

Reach out to your End Point client rep or use our contact form to get in touch.

Studying “The Mythical Man-Month” in Collaboration with a Client

2024-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Here at End Point we did an enlightening and fun eleven-week study group in collaboration with one of our clients. We worked through Frederick Brooks Jr.’s book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, which was originally published in 1975, with an expanded edition published in 1995. In certain ways this book is still applicable to our time, and it was a delight to discuss it in a structured study group with coworkers and peers. This particular study group even piqued the curiosity of the owners of both our companies who participated throughout the course!

As part of our effort to continually improve our abilities and awareness, and thus build a strong technical company culture, End Point has done many study groups over the years, such as the Ruby Fight Club and the You Don’t Know JS study group. Participation in these groups is voluntary, and they have covered a range of other topics including PostgreSQL, terminal fluency skills, and regular expressions. The opportunity to step away from regular work duties for an hour during the week, and to have meaningful discourse between coworkers has been invaluable for building relationships across teams.

For this group, we collaborated with our client Cybergenetics, who works in forensic DNA analysis. We have been working with Cybergenetics since 2003 on PostgreSQL, websites, system deployment automation, and security. A few Cybergenetics staff members joined our PostgreSQL study group some years ago.

Dr. Mark Perlin, the Chief Scientific and Executive Officer of Cybergenetics, approached us a few months earlier with the desire for his team to better understand the history and controversies of software engineering, and to relate relevant topics to software user or developer experiences. He thought working together through this book would be a good way to achieve both those goals, and we agreed.

Fred Brooks’s book on software engineering and project management has a central theme that adding more people to a software project that is behind schedule usually delays it even longer, a concept known as “Brooks’s Law.” Each chapter covers various reasons why this is the case, such as increased communication complexity and overhead, conceptual integrity, and design cohesion degradation. He posits that properly planning projects, including using realistic estimations and considering communication needs, is essential to avoid delays.

Though not all of us found significant modern application for Brooks’s book, it was an interesting historical read, with some relevant points. One such point is his idea that looking forward to some “silver bullet” solution wastes effort and inhibits forward progress. Today, when some are counting on AI technology to magically fix their code, remove the need to properly document that code, or erase the discipline of software development altogether, it seems wise to apply Brooks’s advice and avoid treating AI and similar advances as a “silver bullet.”

At End Point we love encouraging thought and discussion on relevant topics, and we appreciate having a historical awareness of what we’re doing in the context of decades. We also love an opportunity to collaborate with a client on something that is mutually beneficial.

End Point’s CasePointer business acquired by Deloitte

2024-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

We are proud to announce that Deloitte has acquired the industry-leading public health disease surveillance business, CasePointer, from End Point Corporation as of June 1, 2024. This acquisition brings to Deloitte, End Point’s experienced and skilled software engineers, cloud developers, DevOps engineers, epidemiologists, and former public health officials.

Since 2008, End Point’s CasePointer business has worked with open-source public health software to modernize tools, automate processes, improve the user experience, and provide better return on investment to state and local public health agencies for their disease surveillance and epidemiologic needs.

Jon Jensen, End Point’s former chief technical officer, has joined Deloitte with this transaction. He said: “We are excited to work with Deloitte’s team of professionals and serve their broad client base. Together, we expect to make an even greater impact for government health organizations.”

Deloitte is only acquiring assets, clients, and personnel related to End Point’s CasePointer business. All other business lines remain with End Point, including systems administration, database engineering, e-commerce programming, application development, and our immersive GIS platform, VisionPort.

See Deloitte’s Public Health Transformation website for further information.

End Point meetup in Ljubljana, Slovenia

2023-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Remote-first work

End Point has always been a primarily remote work company. We have offices in Manhattan, New York City and Johnson City, Tennessee, yet the people who work in them mostly interact online with remote colleagues.

Most of the time that is wonderful because we have no commute if we work at home, or as short of a commute as we want for those who work in a nearby office or co-working space. We are also able to move without changing jobs. And our meetings with clients are usually remote in any case.

International interaction

Perhaps best of all, working remote-first has allowed us to work together with colleagues around the world: currently in 13 countries and as many time zones. That is pretty good international representation for a company of 70 people.

A downside of mostly remote work is that we generally have to make an effort to ever meet each other in person. And while remote meetings are convenient, they lack some impact that in-person meetings have. There is especially a big difference between meeting remotely with someone you have never met, and someone you’ve met in person at least once!

So we try to meet up with our co-workers when we are at all “in the neighborhood” of each other. That can happen when more than one of us attends a conference or work on a VisionPort installation, when we meet with a client, when we have meetings at one of our offices, or when one or more of us happens to be traveling and proposes meeting with others in the area.

In 2023 alone I am aware of such meetings among our staff that happened in:

Malaysia
Spain
Belgium
Slovenia
New York
Tennessee
Missouri
Indiana
Utah
Washington (state)
California

And there are probably a few others I didn’t hear about or forgot!

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Here I want to share some photos of a brief meet-up four of us had in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, back in April. I was traveling there while on vacation with my daughter Mira, so I asked around among my co-workers who lived nearby, where “nearby” meant within a few hours’ travel.

Our crew was Couragyn Chretien from Canada and Nicholas Piano from England, both living in Spain; Marco Pessotto from Italy, living in Croatia; and I was on vacation from my current base in Utah.

None of us had been to Ljubljana before and we all were eager to see it. Couragyn and Nicholas flew, Marco drove, and I took a train from Zagreb, Croatia, the previous stop on my itinerary.

We booked vacation rental apartments that were near each other and close to the river that runs through the city, nestled among town squares, pedestrian areas, and restaurants.

We had dinner together the evening we all arrived, and breakfast in the morning, then met in one of the apartments. The four of us had recently not overlapped very much in End Point projects we were involved with, so we began by having a few hours of “show and tell” to go over several projects we have been working on for clients.

Here is Nicholas giving us an application demonstration:

As we are prone to do, we dug into some of our current technical challenges to try to help each other out of problems. That was actually really helpful because it forced us to move beyond high-level descriptions and app demos to implementation and troubleshooting. I don’t remember that we solved any big problem this time, but so it goes.

We next talked about an internal development project that may yet see the light of day.

We also had an impromptu review of our main website’s Google Analytics reports to reflect on the effects of our domain move from endpoint.com to endpointdev.com almost two years prior. Visitor traffic and broken links are some of the many domain move considerations and most of us were not deeply involved in that process so it was good to spread some of the knowledge learned.

We wrapped up with a timed selfie:

Then before dinner we were treated to a walking tour of Ljubljana by our local friend Šime Kodžoman, who I met about a decade earlier through his brother Jure and the European Perl and Interchange open source software developer communities.

Šime knows a ton about the city and we spent an enjoyable afternoon and evening together as we walked 13–14 km ≈ 8–9 miles and saw as much as we could.

A few highlights among many:

If you are interested in learning more about Ljubljana, there are plenty of good resources to read online. Start with ljubljana.si, visitljubljana.com, and Wikipedia’s Ljubljana entry.

We wrapped up our day with another meal together, and the next morning we headed our separate ways.

It was great to meet each other in person, to see Šime again, and to get a feel for a beautiful city!

Tennessee Hackathon 2023

2023-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

We just had our first company gathering in our Tennessee office after a hiatus of several years. About 20 End Pointers came to our Johnson City, Tennessee office to work on various VisionPort projects. For several of us, it also provided an opportunity to meet each other in person for the first time.

End Point Tennessee office (EPTN)

Other than our Johnson City-based team, for many of us this was our first look at our Tennessee office from which the VisionPort systems are assembled, tested and shipped.

Our Content Management System (CMS) team worked on some exciting updates to our VisionPort CMS, including important modifications to our touchscreen systems and improvements to the user interface.

Meanwhile our Research & Development team worked on upgrades to the VisionPort system itself, focusing on integrating large and small touchscreens for multimedia presentations. One such improvement was support for 8 tabletop touchscreens integrated to serve 16 museum visitors simultaneously.

Our support team worked on testing and spinning up documentation to bring our inventory up to date and prepare for the next wave of our new VisionPort CMS installations.

Casablanca

The luxurious lounge working space at one of our Airbnb locations, nicknamed Casablanca, enabled us to be comfortably spread out as we worked together on various projects.

A morning meeting with plenty of room left:

A quiet comfy corner for planning!

Working breakfasts:

Pigeon

Just across from Casablanca, we did some relaxing in the “Pigeon coop”, another luxurious abode:

Impromptu roof terrace get together:

Birthdays, dinner, and farewell

We also had a couple of employee birthdays to celebrate during the hackathon!

And a tasty dinner with everyone the final evening:

It was great to see everyone at the Tennessee office. We did plenty of hard work, sometimes sitting elbow to elbow. It certainly was a great opportunity after working together remotely, and helped us experience the camaraderie which is typical of End Point’s unique spirit. Until next time, we will continue to improve our VisionPort systems and extend our remote collaboration!

How We Do It

2022-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

As CEO of End Point Dev, a tech and software company of about 50 people, I have seen our company tested with many challenges over our 27 years in business: the “dot-com” implosion in 2000, the financial crisis of 2009, and various wars and geopolitical upheavals, to name a few.

The latest, of course, are the well-documented hurdles associated with running a company in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the political divisions that have been simultaneously affecting the world.

Today I want to reflect on how End Point has navigated these churning waters. Perhaps some of our approaches may be useful to others.

Distributed Workforce

End Point is a distributed company and has been since its founding in 1995. This means that most of the staff works remotely from home offices, using telecommunication. This lets us be distributed all over the globe and has allowed us to:

Minimize office costs, which helps offset our occasional travel costs for in-person meetings;
Find highly-qualified people wherever they live, not just in the geographic areas near our company offices in New York City and eastern Tennessee;
Enable staff who prefer to work from home to do so, while those who prefer to work in an office have that option;
Provide the opportunity to our staff to work for a company they may not have been able to otherwise;
Hone the skills needed to collaborate effectively with our clients who are rarely near one of our offices;
Maintain a global 24×7 workforce despite our modest size, helping us serve our clients and their users around the world.

Communication

It is crucial for our clients to be able to communicate quickly, thoroughly, and clearly with our engineers and project managers. As a distributed company, End Point was an early adopter of many different methods of communication. Some that we use most often include:

Text chat with Zulip, Slack, Teams, etc.
Email
Video meetings with Google Meet, Zoom, Skype, etc.
Google Calendar
Google Docs and Drive
Git version control and GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.
Project management such as Trello, JIRA, Asana, Basecamp, etc.
Odoo ERP
QuickBooks in the cloud
the good old-fashioned telephone

Because End Point’s engineers often work directly with our clients on projects both large and small, we have always made it a priority that our engineers employ good written and spoken English language skills on top of the many excellent technical skills they possess.

Management Structure and Support

Our internal organization needs frequent asynchronous communication and regular synchronous meetings with each other in order to coordinate work, respond to company issues, and plan ahead. Our main groupings are:

Teams: The company is divided into teams loosely based on area of expertise or type of clients served. Each team typically meets weekly as a way to stay in touch with each other, stay current with goings-on around the company, and to maintain camaraderie.
Project managers: Our clients range from small mom & pop companies who occasionally draw on the help of a single engineer, to large multinationals engaging full teams of engineers for years. Our project managers meet weekly to ensure needed attention is given to every client.
Client representatives: Each of our clients has a client representative assigned to them to assure their needs are taken care of from the business perspective. Directors, team managers, project managers, and engineers all step into this role, which helps us maintain client-centric focus throughout the company.
Team managers: Managers of teams meet weekly to discuss company direction, workload, and staff needs.
Officers and directors: We steer the company and help others with their challenges.

Individual Pride and Job Satisfaction

End Point works hard to make sure that people are recognized for their accomplishments. Our company culture foremost has been the acknowledgement that our staff are people first, with family and other personal needs as well as their jobs. We try to create an environment where our staff feel supported and cared for. Some ways we work at this include:

Internal newsletter: Featuring company news, personal events, latest accomplishments, interesting facts and anecdotes, milestones, and more.
Reviews: We hold informal reviews monthly for new hires and mid-year for veterans, as well as formal reviews yearly for everyone, to discuss their work and the bigger life picture too.
Monthly company-wide meetings: Each month the entire company joins together for a video conference with presentation and discussion on topics ranging from new technology to reviewing security protocols to demonstration of completed client projects.
Milestones: Bonuses for longevity in the company.
Annual bonuses: End Point does its best to provide staff with annual bonuses around the December holidays.
Shout-outs: We frequently recognize accomplishments by sharing them with the whole company.
Celebrations: It’s a small thing, but staff birthdays and special achievements are celebrated with lunches and dinners.
Support: End Point makes a strong effort to be flexible when it comes to individuals’ extenuating life circumstances. We want our staff to feel supported.
Flexibility: We all strive to be flexible with each others’ schedules. Each team comes up with a model that works best for its members. Staggered start times, variously coordinated stretches of work, and planned meetings are taken into consideration as staff are encouraged to fashion a work day that best fits them personally.
All-staff letters: Pre-pandemic, I sent occasional letters to our staff, mostly on holidays or to rally spirits when unusual situations arose. Over the past two years I’ve made this a much more frequent practice, from simple well-wishes to company-wide matters to more extended writing on world events such as COVID-19.

Technical Diversification

End Point started as a two-person web development shop. Through the natural progression of technology, our clients’ needs, and the desire to adapt our company to economic tides, we have diversified our offerings and products.

End Point is particularly diversified for a company of its size. While that can be difficult to balance, it has aided in continuing the growth of the company. Some of our key areas of technical expertise:

Consulting: E-commerce, hosting, business applications
Technology: JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Java, .NET/C#, Django, Python, Perl, PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, payment processing, third-party integrations, to name a few
Database: migrations, performance, support, disaster recovery, and general consulting
AI: Robot Operating System (ROS) and artificial intelligence engineering
VisionPort: Formerly called End Point’s Liquid Galaxy, it has many visual presentation and multi-screen capabilities
EpiTrax: A disease monitoring and reporting platform used by many states

Client Diversification

I have always maintained that End Point should strive to have a mix of small, medium, and large clients, each having their own needs, engagement timeline, business processes, and project lifecycles.

Often there are circumstances beyond our control that determine how long they engage our company. Over the years, hundreds of clients have come through our virtual doors, with some moving on and some still with us after many years.

Today, through a mixture of work, evolving skills, and no small degree of luck, End Point maintains a base of about 125 clients. This diversification has helped us to weather storms affecting specific areas.

Making lemonade out of lemons

End Point has not been immune to economic and business setbacks.

As an example, at the beginning of the pandemic there was a significant slowdown in sales of VisionPort because the real estate industry ground to a halt. We used that opportunity to innovate and improve many areas of this product, including building a new content management system and new features that enabled our visualization platform to be managed and shared outside of the office.

The future

On Wall Street there is a well-known expression: “Past performance is not indicative of future results.” This applies to many facets of business management. My takeaway is that one never knows what the future holds. There is no escaping that, aside from general good practices, one can never fully plan for tough times. We must improvise and adapt to circumstances.

Our company isn’t perfect, but what I have discussed here has helped keep our company stable. As CEO of End Point, I’m proud that we are a company that works hard to be there for our clients and our staff in both good times and bad.

From Liquid Galaxy to VisionPort

2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

We are rebranding! Meet the future of Liquid Galaxy: VisionPort.

We are proud to announce the official launch of VisionPort, the next phase for Liquid Galaxy. We have spent the past six months taking steps to rebrand, expand, and reposition our product to combine modern working necessities with the traditional kiosk-style, shared immersive experience familiar to our clients. Through these efforts have come a robust product encompassing an entire room of enhanced features, screens, and conference-enabling applications.

While our core product will remain consistent with what our clients know and love, current and future clients can look forward to significant updates to the content management system and user experience. We are also proud to announce advanced add-on features that will allow our current and future clients to make their systems more collaborative, interactive, and adaptable to their needs.

Our core offerings include:

Extensive preparation and customization of screens, servers, and frames
Google Earth, Cesium, Street View, etc.
Content Management System
Ongoing support service
Custom installation, system, and content consulting
Comprehensive system and content training

Our add-on offerings now include:

Video Conference Integration: Allows users to join video conferences or host meetings with a native, software-level view of the Liquid Galaxy.
Screen Share Integration: Allows users to share their content to the main displays. Supports sharing laptop, phone, or tablet’s presentation files and media to any screen on VisionPort.
Media Stream Integration: Allows users to share any HDMI video source onto any of the main displays on VisionPort.
Support for integrating all the above and the Content Management System with any additional side displays to complement the main screens.
VisionPort Remote: Full remote control of the content and camera view, intended for touch devices. Also supports remote view-only sharing.

All of these enhancements are detailed at our new website, www.visionport.com.

Please note that we also recently made a major domain change for our organization: Our new domain name is www.endpointdev.com — feel free to look through that site as well!

If you have any questions for us, please reach out to us at info@visionport.com.
For sales, sales@visionport.com.
For billing, billing@visionport.com.
For support, support@visionport.com.

In the same vein, all existing and future clients can now reach us at the www.visionport.com domain. Our team will be proactively reaching out to all of our clients to inform them of these changes, and will be available to answer any questions about the changes or upgrades available.

We are very excited about these new advancements, offerings, and rebranding opportunities. We look forward to engagement with current and future clients alike.

Moving to EndPointDev.com

2021-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Hello to all our cherished clients and friends. I am excited to make an announcement!

End Point has changed our domain name from EndPoint.com to EndPointDev.com.

While our official legal name remains End Point Corporation, we are also updating our branding to match our new domain name. You will notice on our website that we are now referring to ourselves as End Point Dev, the “Dev” being short for “development.”

There are many companies named End Point and there has been a little confusion about this over the years. None of the other End Points (or “Endpoints”) do the type of development work that we do. They range from a utility company to a title insurance company to a medical lab services company and beyond. In our quest to separate ourselves and distinguish who we are, we are transitioning to EndPointDev.com.

From now on you will receive email from, and send email to, your contacts here with their new suffix-adjusted domain names, e.g., instead of rick@endpoint.com use rick@endpointdev.com. After December 1, 2021, expect your emails to bounce back if you do not use the new and correct email address.

This change also holds true for our group/alias addresses that you may be using, such as billing@endpoint.com, accountspayable@endpoint.com, etc., which are now billing@endpointdev.com, accountspayable@endpointdev.com, etc.

At End Point Dev we have expanded our services, capabilities, and expertise greatly in recent years. Our capabilities range from ecommerce to 3D visualization platforms, from database to AI and other applications development, from cloud devops and hosting services to critically needed EpiTrax disease tracking and tracing for states throughout the U.S.

We believe that this rebranding effort will help distinguish us, but it will require a bit of housekeeping. So please update your email address books and web browser bookmarks. Thank you!

Liquid Galaxy Hackathon 2021

2021-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

A few months ago we had our first company gathering since the pandemic started. About 20 End Pointers came to our New York City office to work on various Liquid Galaxy projects, and for several of us, to meet each other in person for the first time.

Except for our NYC-based team, this was everyone’s first look at the “new” office; we moved offices in January of 2020, so COVID-19 shut down about 14 months of office use.

Our CMS team worked on some exciting updates to our Liquid Galaxy CMS, including implementing new and improved techonologies for the database and user interface.

The CMS team: Zed, Dan, and Jeff

Our Research and Development team worked on upgrades to the Liquid Galaxy itself, focusing on creating smoother transitions for multimedia presentations. This included a custom window manager created by Matt, dubbed “Matt WM” by the team.

Will, Matt, Jacob, and Neil, hard at work

Our support team worked on spinning up documentation and data entry to bring our inventory up to date and prepare for the next wave of installations.

Darius hacking away

It was great to see everyone at the NYC office, working elbow to elbow. We saw plenty of the hard work and camaraderie which is End Point’s speciality. Until next time, we will continue to improve the Liquid Galaxy remotely!

Converting to Hugo

2021-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

We recently converted the End Point website from Middleman to Hugo. I’ll go into more detail shortly, but the general result has been much better build times with less configuration and better support for local development.

Background

In 2017 we converted this website from a Ruby on Rails app to a static site. With tons of high-quality static site generator options, we could implement the shiny features used by our Rails site in 2009 with less overhead and quicker load times.

We also wanted to move away from Blogger to self-hosting our blog, using GitHub issues for comments. We ended up switching to Middleman, a static site generator written in Ruby, and had a mostly positive experience. Ruby was a good fit switching from Rails, and (if I remember correctly) Middleman had pretty competitive performance.

With over 1000 blog posts at the time, as well as lots of other pages, our site was quite slow to build—3.5 minutes when building with the full blog.

Middleman had a nice development server, but due to some server-side rewrites, we couldn’t use it. Instead, we got around the build times by writing a simple Ruby script to generate an HTML preview, letting our blog authors see what their post would look like, more or less. This worked okay, but was not 100% accurate and made copy-editing and formatting slower than it needed to be for us “Keepers of the Blog”.

We started hiding most of the blog from Middleman while building to save time, but build times were still 40 seconds or more. With our patience for long build times waning, as well as Middleman losing most of its support in the development and user community, we decided to get in the market for a new site generator.

Shopping around

Before we (🚨 spoiler alert 🚨) settled on Hugo, we tried using Zola, a site generator written in Rust and boasting tiny build times. Zola is a small project, and would have worked fairly well for us, but it had several downsides.

Initial build times were very promising, but slowed down more than expected after adding our now more than 1500 blog posts. We still ended up with very respectable build times of less than 15 seconds.
As far as I could tell, Zola would have required an _index.md file in every section and subsection, to hold section settings or to make it a transparent section, passing its files to the parent section. I didn’t like the sound of having a couple hundred extra Markdown files, one for every blog year and month.
At the time of writing, Zola doesn’t support custom taxonomy paths. That means we would have our blog tags at www.endpointdev.com/tags/, instead of our existing (and preferred) www.endpointdev.com/blog/tags/. This has been discussed on Zola forums, but seems to have stalled. This wasn’t a complete dealbreaker, but it was disappointing.

Making the switch to Hugo

We wanted to see if there was another option which solved our issues with Zola. I decided to try Hugo. It’s written in Go and is currently one of the most popular static site generators.

I partially converted the site and blog, and found that Hugo solved our main concerns with Zola:

Build times were close to twice as fast as Zola.
You can dump as many subdirectories as you want in each section, and they’ll still belong to the section but retain the original directory structure.
Hugo supports custom taxonomy paths through its permalinks.

We were also able to shave off a lot of build time by analyzing our template metrics—this is one of my favorite features in Hugo.

Local development

So far, we’ve had extremely smooth local development. Hugo (like Zola) comes as a standalone single executable, so it’s extremely easy to get started or update. This was a huge improvement over Middleman, which required a heap of Ruby gems and plugins. Now every blog author can easily clone our repo, run the development server, and edit their post directly, with the full site building in anywhere from ~10 seconds all the way down to ~2 seconds, depending on the author’s machine.

For blog authors, we were using a fork of an abandoned Middleman plugin. With Hugo, we’re using their taxonomies, which have been fairly easy to set up. We were also able to use Hugo’s built-in Chroma highlighter, instead of loading and running highlight.js on every blog page.

Some drawbacks

July 2025 Update: Hugo has seen a lot of development since this post was written in 2021. I’ve added Wayback Machine links so the references are historical, but these examples are out of date now. From my usage in the past few years, the documentation has improved quite a bit.

We’re loving the wonderfully fast build times and easy local development. I like the templating fairly well, and the simple configuration is wonderful. But Hugo does have several issues and missing features I’d like to see.

One place Zola wins over Hugo is the ability to easily print the entire context in a big JSON object. It’s a bit hard to navigate, but in my experience much easier and clearer than Hugo, where I have to either try using printf to display the context’s variables, or search through the documentation. This was one of my favorite ways to quickly debug and learn about the inner workings of Zola, and would be very welcome in Hugo as well, without needing to know Go formatting width and the full shape of Hugo’s context object beforehand.

Joe Mooring, a Hugo developer, mentioned that you can print some things with debug.Dump. I tried passing the context with {{ debug.Dump . }}, which worked well for seeing what context variables are available/set.

Documentation is another area where Hugo struggles sometimes. Pages often don’t feel interconnected and examples are often lacking. Here are a few examples I encountered:

The Hugo Pipes page SASS/SCSS shows how to transform Sass files to CSS, but did not link to the very useful Page Resources page. It turned out I just needed to link to {{ $style.RelPermalink }}, but as a new user it wasn’t clear that the CSS file was considered a Resource. Having more links to related pages or more examples could save a lot of headaches for newbies.
Lookup Order says under the Layout section that it “can be set in page front matter,” but I had to look under Front Matter to see that layout is the key name. A small change, and didn’t take long to experiment and find out, but especially since YAML is case sensitive, having a link to the actual front matter key would be better.
Enabling custom outputs on a per-taxonomy basis does not seem to be possible. We want to generate Atom feeds for our blog tags, but not for our blog authors, both of which are taxonomies. As far as I can tell, we have to enable them both and live with the cruft of unnecessary blog author feeds being generated.
Joe also provided a solution to this problem: cascade the outputs front matter field down from the taxonomy page (e.g., content/tags/_index.md) or from your site configuration.
- https://gohugo.io/configuration/cascade/
- https://gohugo.io/content-management/front-matter/#cascade-1
I tested this and it works like a charm.

Onward and upward!

It may look (mostly) the same, but on our end it’s never been easier to write blog posts or update the website, thanks to Hugo and all its contributors!

End Point Relocates Its Tennessee Office

2021-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

After having been located in Bluff City for close to eight years, End Point is pleased to announce that it has recently relocated its Tennessee office to Johnson City. The new location is an improved facility that better serves our Liquid Galaxy team. A group of veteran End Pointers including Matt Vollrath, Neil Elliot, and Josh Ausborne are working out of the new location, alongside more recent employees Josh Harless and myself.

Our Tennessee office has an important role in providing remote access to various Liquid Galaxy platforms so that other End Point engineers can work on them. Johnson City has recently begun a fiber internet initiative through its power company, BrightRidge. We were lucky enough to be in the first wave of installations and got cables run underground to our office so that we can enjoy speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (gigabit).

This office is where we test new content, features, updates, or entirely new designs. The interior design includes plenty of space to concentrate on individual work, as well as for test systems and preparing new units for shipment. It is also well-suited for collaborative work with both onsite and remote teammates on R&D, content development, remote updates, and support.

The office is located in a much newer building with easy access to the interstate freeway and a wide variety of restaurants and hotels. Gone is the transmission-destroying hill where our previous office sat. Instead we are located on a freight truck-accessible cul-de-sac perfect for Liquid Galaxy shipments.

Our new office boasts efficient window treatments, better HVAC, an open concept design, and plenty of space for everyone to work, build, and assemble new Liquid Galaxies. And as a bonus, the location dramatically reduces our commute times.

If you are in the area, let us know if you would like to come visit with us in the office!

Web Projects for a Rainy Day

2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Image by Yellowstone NPS on Flickr

With the COVID-19 quarantine disrupting life for many of us, I thought I’d put together a list of things you can do with your website on a rainy day. These are things to keep your business moving even if you’re at home and some of your projects are stuck waiting on things to reopen. If you’re looking for some useful things to do to fill your days over the next few months, this post is for you!

Major Version Updates

Make a list of your entire stack, from OS to database to development frameworks. Note the current version and research the current supported versions. I find Wikipedia pages to be fairly reliable for this (e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS). Ok, so what things need to be updated, or will need to be in the next year? Start on those now and use some downtime to get ahead of your updates.

Sample of a client’s stack review

Software	Purpose	Our version	Release date	End of support	Next update	Newest version	Notes
CentOS	OS for e-commerce server	7	July 2014	June 2024	Not imminent	8	https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product
Nginx	Web server	1.16.0	March 2020	Unclear	Not imminent	1.16.1	https://nginx.org/
PostgreSQL	Database server	9.5.20	January 2016	Feb 2020	Medium term, to version 11	12	https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/
Rails	App framework for store	5.1	February 2017	Current	Long Term, to version 6	6	https://rubygems.org/gems/rails/versions
Spree	Ecommerce and admin gem	3.3	April 2017	Current	Long Term, to version 4	4	https://rubygems.org/gems/spree/versions
Elasticsearch	Search platform for product import/search	5.6.x	September 2017	March 2019	Immediate, to version 6.8	7.4	https://www.elastic.co/support/eol
WordPress	Info site	5.2.3	September 2019	Unclear	5.2.4 shipped recently	5.2	https://codex.wordpress.org/Supported_Versions

Content Cleanup & SEO Review

Everyone’s website gets cluttered with outdated content. Take a look at your pages, review, and update what needs to be changed. Pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO) concerns as you go through it. Make sure your content has headers, accurate keywords, and good meta-descriptions. Research SEO best practices if you need a refresher.

Nowadays, reducing repeated content has huge benefits for SEO so we recommend any content review includes a review of duplication. If you have a small site, you can go through your content and SEO manually. Larger projects can utilize tools on the market such as Siteliner or WPOptimize.

While you’re taking a dive into content, don’t forget to review your Google Analytics and understand what content is being used and what isn’t. Google has added many new features to Analytics and Ads, so it’s a good idea to refresh yourself on the updated documentation and new features.

Reporting

A lot of clients with big ecommerce data sets or other applications that collect data benefit from a separate reporting or business analytics tool. A rainy day can be a good time to think about what reports you want on last year’s business, what data will help you plan for the future. End Point has worked with a few different reporting tools that easily add on to your database, like Pentaho or Jasper and those can be really useful.

Documentation

I wouldn’t be a good project manager if I didn’t throw this one in the list. Documentation is so, so important, yet really we can always do more. End Point uses a few different tools, including wikis running MediaWiki and Google Docs, for keeping track of project details. Now’s a good time to set up a nice documentation system or do a big review and make sure everything is updated and back in order. Maybe dream of a vacation you might be able to take when this is over and make sure everything’s ready for you to do that.

Disaster Recovery Tests

For anyone with business-critical infrastructure, you need to ensure you know how to get everything back up and running in the case of a major failure, either with on-premises or cloud hosting. Now’s a good time to clarify with your hosting vendor things like: What are your backups like? What is your disaster recovery plan? What is the timeline for recovering the application in the event of a major failure? If you can, take time to do a simulation and make sure all the pieces are there if they need to be. Simply said, we also need to test our backups in order to ensure that they actually work.

Redesign

If you’ve been meaning to refresh your website, a rainy day is prime time to do it. Designers and developers are looking for projects and you’ll have extra time on your hands to oversee the process, spend time reviewing and testing, and get things done just the way you want.

Automated Testing

Good developers want an automated test suite as part of their application. Not all applications were built with this from the beginning and many didn’t have the budget or time to get it done. With extra time on your hands, this can be a great time to start building your test suite or to improve the coverage of your existing one.

Unit tests in particular are a good place to start. Unit tests are great not only because they help validate software correctness and protect against regressions, but also because they require a well-factored and modular system. This means that, while writing your unit tests, you will often be forced to go back to your application’s code base and refactor it to make it testable, to make it better. Investing in creating a solid unit test suite is a great bang for your buck. You can also look at implementing continuous integration—having a pipeline to let multiple developers deploy code throughout the day and configure your automated tests into the workflow.

Versioning & Deployment Tools

When you’re cleaning house, take a look at your Git version control repository and make sure everything important is in there. We have a few projects that have a main project in Git, but sometimes the smaller projects and one-offs can go astray. This is a good time to get everything organized into one repository, or make sure external repositories are connected and integrated.

Automated DevOps deployment tools can also be nice to work on. Tools like Ansible and Chef can take a lot of time to set up and test, but they have some great time-saving and accuracy advantages down the line. Our in-house security experts also recommend tools like AIDE and OSSEC which automate monitoring file changes daily.

Security Audit and Monitoring

Taking a few days to review your personal security and that of your application is something you should do regularly and now’s a good time to plan for it. Charlie’s got a great security post that’s a good top-level review. For application security, End Point uses some tools for vulnerability scanning. We also have a checklist of basic security items that include password handling, PII data, and other common security holes. For certain projects/clients we must also take HIPAA or PCI DSS compliance into account. Also, don’t neglect to review your TLS status and ensure that web applications run on TLS 1.2 and are TLS 1.3 ready. This also may relate to the underlying operating systems—whether they are able to support the latest TLS version natively.

Optimization and Performance:

Most of the time new features have higher priority than improving the performance of an existing system. It could be the right time to review core functionalities and list out the areas that need improvement in serving a better experience to customers by optimization. The areas can be focused on optimizing code, database queries, image size, data compression over network, adding cache, CDN, and so on. We’ve been moving quite a few clients to the Cloudflare DNS and CDN service and we’ve been really happy with it. Optimization work will definitely influence the customer retention rate which helps to increase profitability long term.

Refactoring

Along the same lines as optimization, code refactoring can have long term gains in performance and ease of future development. Think of this like house cleaning. It is always easier to find any item in the house when things are arranged in an orderly manner. Similarly, the organized and clean code base will play a vital role in future code changes and development, helping to reduce the chances of unexpected bugs, save time making changes at one place and improving code readability. Disciplined refactoring delivers readable, reusable, non-redundant code. Refactoring can be applied to your databases and user interfaces as well.

Want to get started on some background projects for your website? Talk to us today.

The Dollars and Sense of Hiring Software Consultants

2019-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash

I’m often asked by family and friends about End Point’s market and how software consulting fits into the business landscape and I thought I’d write up some thoughts for the general public in how hiring a consultant is actually the smartest thing to do for your business and it makes a ton of sense financially.

Let’s talk some math about hiring an in-house developer:

According to Glassdoor, the average software developer salary is around $50,000–$120,000. Let’s say $85,000 per year. You typically pay for health insurance, other benefits and overhead expenses, so let’s just round the total cost of hiring one person to $110,000 per year (I think that’s actually pretty conservative).
You’d probably need to hire two people to support anything essential to your business, since having a single developer is risky (illness/vacation/employment change, etc.).
Your total cost of getting two developers in-house is around ~$220,000 per year

	Hiring your own developers	Software consulting agency
Senior developers	✓	✓
Diverse skillset	?	✓
Protection from staffing changes	✗	✓
Flexible budget	✗	✓
Staff up and down easily	✗	✓

Consulting Instead of Hiring

Spending less: You could spend $40,000–$50,000 a year in consulting and get excellent coverage, including new feature development and support for your project. Some of our customers even spend substantially less than that.
Skillset: Were you able to hire two people that know all of your software stack? Can they work on your CRM/inventory system and do your website? Can they troubleshoot issues with your Windows Active Directory setup? Are they senior developers with a decade of experience? Or did you have to hire junior developers who need to train up on your project?

When you’re working with an End Point team, you’re able to get expert advice on the parts of your system that you need. For example, you might not need a full time DBA, but we can provide you an expert database resource for a few hours a week. You might not have enough work for a full time network engineer, but you do need someone to help with your SSL certificates, domain names, and caching layer. In that case, one of End Point’s DevOps engineers can offer you help for a few hours a month.

Team resources: What happens if someone doesn’t know something? Do they have a resource to turn to or are they trying to figure it out with a Google search or Stack Overflow article? End Point has 40+ engineers on our team and we work in a collaborative way to solve problems, giving you the benefit of a very wide diversity in technical skillset.
Hiring: Do you have the technical expertise to vet new employees? Hiring, testing, vetting, and onboarding new developers can be really tricky and End Point’s technical management team takes care of that for you. All of our developers have been through a rigorous skills test before employment. Upon joining the company, developers participate in our technical bootcamp to ensure they understand all of our internal procedures for data handling, security, client management, code verification, teamwork, and many other important skills.
Resource changes: If you’ve hired your two software developers, you still have to replace them in the event of an illness or job transition. If a developer leaves, End Point takes care of resourcing your project with new personnel and getting them up to speed. You don’t have to worry about the hiring or replacement of employees. We assign new team members with the appropriate skills to tackle your project, and our employees have our broad and deep team to call on and consult with to leverage their effectiveness.
Staffing up for a big project: One of the challenges faced by any business looking to do a big project either with an internal application or a website is how to staff up for all the work and then figure out what to do with their staff once the big project is over. Hiring a consulting agency lets you put 2, 3, 4, or even more people on a project for a big push and then back off to fewer people once your development is over. You don’t have to worry about temporary employees or a situation where you have to let one of your employees go due to lack of work or budget for development.

Summary

Hiring consultants can reduce cost for your project development, eliminate the stress of hiring knowledgeable staff, and provide you deep technical experience from a team of professionals.

End Point has some verified client reviews at Clutch.co so read about how we’ve helped our clients!

Meet the End Point Windows consulting group

2018-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

As the share of internet traffic passing through mobile devices hovers around 50%, it’s easy to forget that a lot of computing still happens on desktops and laptops—and perhaps even easier to forget that the majority of those desktops and laptops are running Microsoft Windows.

At End Point, we take pride in being a multi-platform organization and using open source technologies in real-world business environments. Our internal chat service, wiki, and many other libraries and tools we employ across our client base are all open source. However, for various reasons many companies choose Microsoft’s solutions including long-time standards Windows Server, Active Directory, and Exchange.

In April 2017, Dan Briones came to End Point to head up the company’s new Windows infrastructure services. In 2018 we added two new engineers to the mix, Chris Hopkins and Charles Chang, to form a full-service Windows consulting team, all local to our New York City office on Park Avenue.

Dan Briones

Dan is the team lead and has over three decades of hands-on experience in IT systems management, systems integrations, migrations, virtualization, networking, security, orchestration, security, compliance, and maintenance, specializing in the Microsoft Windows ecosystem. He also develops applications using the .NET framework and SQL Server database. Dan works with many of our local New York clients, focusing on their network and infrastructure.

Charles Chang

Charles has 21 years of experience in IT ranging from managing Windows infrastructure, to datacenter relocation and hardware refresh initiatives, office relocation, virtualization, disaster recovery and business continuity strategy. Charles has worked extensively with major vendors such as VMware, IBM, EMC, Cisco, and Dell in building enterprise environments in the datacenter. He also has experience in implementing data loss prevention technology, web and email filtering to protect and provide a healthy infrastructure.

Chris Hopkins

Chris has 10 years of experience in IT, network support, and development. He has extensive cross-platform development and hardware knowledge. Chris excels at mail migrations, Active Directory and Windows Server environments, site-to-site website migrations, and cloud-based phone systems.

Learn more about the services our Windows consulting group offers and talk to us today about how we can help you too!

Work philosophy canon

2018-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Shared culture

Having some shared culture is important for working together well, and we can build that culture on familiar terminology, understanding, experiences, stories, and ideas.

To help give all of us at End Point some common reference points, we have collected a set of valuable articles and books that we encourage everyone to read.

Some of these have been standard reading at End Point for more than a decade, while others have been added over the years since we began doing this. Some are short and simple, others more in-depth. Our list is intentionally general, mostly avoiding specific technologies that only a subset of us use.

No one article or book can be entirely authoritative for all situations, but each gives us more of the wisdom out there to consider and judiciously apply where it fits.

Slow and steady

When new employees start at End Point, we ask them to read the articles during their first week or two, and the relevant books within roughly their first year.

Reading only a little at each sitting and spreading the reading out over time allows the ideas to sink in gradually and be incorporated into our work, rather than overwhelming with new information that cannot all be absorbed at once.

For everyone

Because we work in the software development industry, it is important that not only technical people such as developers, database experts, and system administrators be part of the shared culture. Everyone else at End Point including designers, project managers, sales, marketing, etc. should also be familiar with these articles and the terms and concepts they discuss:

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems by James Somers
Please don’t just say hello in chat originally by Brandon High at nohello.com
Learn to Read the Source, Luke by Jeff Atwood—practical reasons free software and open source matter, and why actually using the source code matters
What is free software? by the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman
The Open Source Definition by the Open Source Initiative
Josh’s Rules (of Database Contracting) by Josh Berkus
On excellence by Ethan Rowe—about ownership, taking responsibility for the problem at hand
Conventions to know by Jon Jensen—little but important things that ease communication in our work
Selling Without Being Salesy by Jason Parks
Five Whys by Eric Ries (covered in more depth in his book The Lean Startup)
Software Is a Mess and I Feel Fine by Alan Stevens
Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley
Getting Real book by 37signals (now Basecamp)

For developers

These articles and books are targeted primarily at developers but enlightening for everyone:

A summary of the international standard date and time notation by Markus Kuhn
The Admin Zen by Michael Prokop—in true DevOps fashion, this system administration advice applies to development too
Things You Should Never Do, Part I by Joel Spolsky—don’t rewrite things from scratch (almost never, anyway)
On Git Commit Messages by Michael Jones; to get a feel for the long history of others sermonizing on the same worthwhile topic, see also:
- How to Write a Git Commit Message by Chris Beams
- On commit messages by Peter Hutterer
- A Note About Git Commit Messages by Tim Pope
Every line of code is always documented by Mislav Marohnić; see also The git pickaxe by Philip Potter
How to Read Other People’s Code—and Why by Christopher Schanck
You don’t know JavaScript by Michael Woloszynowicz—the lessons apply to most technologies
The Pragmatic Programmer book by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (see the write-up on the new 20th anniversary edition by Jon Jensen)
Practices of an Agile Developer book by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt—kind of a sequel to The Pragmatic Programmer (see the review by Ethan Rowe)

Any others?

We are always on the lookout for other readings that are helpful, so feel free to leave a comment with your favorites!

(Updated in early 2021 with articles on Git commit messages and history spelunking, and Choose Boring Technology.)

End Point Featured as Global Leader in Ruby on Rails & Ecommerce Development

2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

As the year comes to a close and we reflect on the goals we’ve accomplished and the work that made it all possible, we are proud to announce our inclusion on the Clutch Global Leaders List, encapsulating the 475+ most highly reviewed companies from around the world. We placed as a leader on both Top Ruby on Rails Developers and Top Ecommerce Developers, being the best New York-based firm on the former and in the top three from New York on the latter.

Achieving the status of a Clutch Global Leader in not just one, but two categories speaks volumes on the effort we’ve put forth in 2017. We couldn’t have hit this milestone without skilled work from End Point staff and the great relationships we’ve nurtured with clients. Looking back on these memorable projects, here are some of the things are clients wrote on our Clutch profile:

“I’ve worked with a lot of different service providers. Results can vary across the board. End Point is very transparent about what they’re working on in terms of providing complete details. We don’t have any surprises at the end of the month as a result. They’re very dependable, delivering what they promise every time,” explained the Director of Ecommerce for a tourism marketing company.

They went on to describe our flexibility and close partnership:

“Many of their team members are instrumental in helping us keep doing everything that we need. Our business evolves and changes. They help us make sure that what we’re building is up to snuff, and scales well with our company. We’ve grown considerably since we’ve hired them.”

Another client, the owner of a B2B platform, commented on our project management expertise and what it was like to work with our team:

“I am very satisfied with End Point. They are a fantastic company to work with. Their engineers are outstanding, their communication skills are excellent, and the delivery speed is great. I have nothing but good things to say about their company.”

To learn more about our clients’ experiences and how we’ve achieved the status of a Clutch Global Leader, stay up-to-date with our Clutch profile.

President of UN General Assembly Thanks End Point

2017-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

The President of UN General Assembly, Peter Thomson, thanked End Point for supporting the Ocean Conference, which was held at the United Nations Headquarters this past summer to bring attention and action to saving the world’s oceans.

End Point’s Liquid Galaxy helped bring to life “Reconnecting Humanity to the Sea,” an exhibition meant to showcase the beauty of the ocean and the challenges it faces today. End Point created the presentation’s content and showcased it at the conference.

“We were very pleased to see End Point’s Liquid Galaxy used to promote a hopeful future for the world’s oceans. It’s very satisfying to see our technology used to make an important story that much more compelling.”

Rick Peltzman
CEO, End Point

This UN press release explains more about the conference and its results:
“UN Ocean Conference wraps up with actions to restore ocean health, protect marine life”

See the letter:

Series Digital joins End Point!

2017-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

End Point has the pleasure to announce some very big news!

After an amicable wooing period, End Point has purchased the software consulting company Series Digital, a NYC-based firm that designs and builds custom software solutions. Over the past decade, Series Digital has automated business processes, brought new ideas to market, and built large-scale dynamic infrastructure.

Series Digital launched in 2006 in New York City. From the start, Series Digital managed large database installations for financial services clients such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup. They also worked with startups including Drop.io, Byte, Mode Analytics, Domino, and Brewster.

These growth-focused, data-intensive businesses benefited from Series Digital’s expertise in scalable infrastructure, project management, and information security. Today, Series Digital supports clients across many major industry sectors and has focused its development efforts on the Microsoft .NET ecosystem. They have strong design and user experience expertise. Their client list is global.

The Series Digital team began working at End Point on April 3rd, 2017.

The CEO of Series Digital is Jonathan Blessing. He joins End Point’s leadership team as Director of Client Engagements. End Point has had a relationship with Jonathan since 2010, and looks forward with great anticipation to the role he will play expanding End Point’s consulting business.

To help support End Point’s expansion into .NET solutions, End Point has hired Dan Briones, a 25-year veteran of IT infrastructure engineering, to serve as Project and Team Manager for the Series Digital group. Dan started working with End Point at the end of March.

The End Point leadership team is very excited by the addition of Dan, Jonathan, and the rest of the talented Series Digital team: Jon Allen, Ed Huott, Dylan Wooters, Vasile Laur, Liz Flyntz, Andrew Grosser, William Yeack, and Ian Neilsen.

End Point’s reputation has been built upon its excellence in e-commerce, managed infrastructure, and database support. We are excited by the addition of Series Digital, which both deepens those abilities, and allows us to offer new services.

Talk to us to hear about the new ways we can help you!

End Point Rings the Morning Bell for Small Business

2017-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Recently Chase unveiled a digital campaign for Chase for Business by asking small businesses to submit themselves ringing their own morning bells every day when they open for business. Chase would select one video every day to post on their website and to play on their big screen in Times Square.

A few months back, Chase chose to feature End Point for their competition! They sent a full production team to our office to film us and how we ring the morning bell.

In preparation for Chase, we built a Liquid Galaxy presentation for Chase on our content management system. The presentation consisted of two scenes. In scene 1, we had “Welcome to Liquid Galaxy” written out across the outside four screens. We displayed the End Point Liquid Galaxy logo on the center screen, and set the system to orbit around the globe. In scene 2, the Liquid Galaxy flies to Chase’s Headquarter office in New York City, and orbits around their office. Two bells ring, each shown across two screens. The bell videos used were courtesy of Rayden Mizzi and St Gabriel’s Church. Our logo continues to display on the center screen, and the Chase for Business website is shown on a screen as well.

The video that Chase created (shown above) features our CEO Rick giving an introduction of our company and then clicking on the Liquid Galaxy’s touchscreen to launch into the presentation.

We had a great time working with Chase, and were thrilled that they chose to showcase our company as part of their work to promote small businesses! To learn more about the Liquid Galaxy, you can visit our Liquid Galaxy website or contact us here.

Office Space Available at End Point HQ!

2016-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Our office-mates are leaving, and we are looking to fill their desk space. There are 8 open desks available, including one desk in a private office.

Amenities include free wifi, furniture, conference room access, kitchen access, regular office cleaning, and close proximity (one block) to Madison Square Park.

Our company, End Point, is a tech company that builds ecommerce sites, and also develops the Liquid Galaxy. There are typically 4 or 5 of us in the office on a given day. We are quiet, friendly, and respectful.

Please contact us for more information.

Reflections on Being a Co-working Couple

2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Over Labor Day weekend I married another End Point employee, David Christensen. I thought I’d take a minute to reflect on life as a co-working couple. In the days before everyone worked in a mad scramble to pay off their student loans, save for their kids’ college, and save for retirement, lots of couples shared in the responsibilities of owning a business or farm. Today for most families those days are long gone and each spouse goes off to a long day at the office to meet back at home in the evening.

David and I are really fortunate to work at End Point and work remotely from our home in Lawrence, Kansas. David is a veteran at End Point starting as an application developer a decade ago and now is a project manager and heads up many of End Point’s larger sales, database, and VR projects. I am brand-new to End Point and serve as the Client Liaison doing billing, client support, sales, and project management.

Our home office in Lawrence

What I love

Being together all the time

Like any newlywed, I cannot get enough of this guy. He’s easy to talk to, fun to be around, and pretty much makes everything better. But enough of that sappiness…

Getting some real insight on personality issues or conflicts

Working with someone that knows you really well and who can see your perspective can be really valuable—especially if you are navigating conflict or a political/personal issue, or just generally need some advice. I have always found deep friendships at work to help me work through these issues and having a spouse around has been great for this.

Getting up-to-speed on company culture

Having another person, especially one who’s been at a company for a long time, can really help you understand how things work, how each person or manager thinks, what to do, and what not to do. Who doesn’t want that kind of leg up at a new job?

A proofreader

I always like to have a work buddy. Having a spouse next to you to proofread your work, make sure you aren’t doing something crazy, and just generally keep an eye on things is really handy. Plus we can help remind each other of priorities and calendar appointments.

Near the End Point NYC Office

Things that take work

Not over-talking

I can be a real chatterbox and so can David. We have to be careful not to over-talk about work. You can quickly burn an hour or two re-hashing a meeting or a project. It takes work and setting boundaries to not overanalyze every work situation.

Setting boundaries

David and I realized that once we were working together, living together, and raising kids together, everything that people experience as separate parts of their lives had now run into one long day called life. We had virtually no separation between work, the house, or our relationship. We created artificial boundaries for work time and try really hard not to talk about work on our personal time unless it’s important and vice-versa.

Individual space

When you know so much about a person’s workload and personal life, you can sometimes be too helpful. You have to remember to give your spouse the space to be the creative, awesome person you know and love; not micro-manage their day.

By far the biggest challenge for me are the social limitations that working from home with a spouse inevitably creates. I used to work for a company of 400, so co-working from home with only one other person is quite a change. I’m still looking to fill up my social needs in other ways. The upside here is that I’ve become really close with my neighbors.

Thinking about becoming a co-working couple?

I’m pretty new at this, so just a couple notes. Give me a few years … maybe I’ll have more!

Putting all your eggs in one basket

One thing that does take some planning and thought is putting all your financial eggs in one basket. Working for the same company is a little riskier than diversifying your paychecks. David and I felt like since we have both had marketable skills that would be useful anywhere, this wasn’t a deal-breaker for us.

Find a supportive company

Obviously, the biggest hurdle is finding a company that supports having co-working couples and is willing to work with you through it. End Point is a great place to work with a very family-friendly atmosphere which has made this part really easy on us.

Find unique job roles that you’ll enjoy

This is true for starting any new job at all, but if you are thinking of starting to co-work with your spouse, make sure this job is something you’ll be good at and will enjoy. There’s more than just your reputation at stake here.

And with that, I better see what David has been up to…

Josh and Lele Interviewed as Experts in Leading Cloud Technologies

2016-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

End Point’s Josh Williams and Lele Calò were recently interviewed for a piece that is now published on Clutch, a site offering B2B research and reviews. Josh and Lele were interviewed as experts in leading cloud technologies. The interview can be found here.

Josh and Lele began the interview by giving some background on End Point and its various offerings. These offerings include software development, hosting, consulting, and the Liquid Galaxy division.

Josh and Lele then answered questions regarding cloud technologies. These questions included technologies they work with, challenges that cloud technologies help companies overcome, and recommendation for companies moving toward cloud services. Recently, End Point has had customers using Amazon Web Services [AWS], Rackspace, OVH, Google Cloud, Linode, and DigitalOcean. Josh and Lele agree that cloud services are quite beneficial in dealing with usage profiles and load inconsistencies. Josh and Lele also agreed that when it comes to companies moving into cloud services, moving components in a modular fashion and not all at once is a key to success.

Clutch asked Josh and Lele about costs in utilizing cloud technologies. Lele explained that the cost will vary based on what the company needs to do with its cloud infrastructure. Josh went on to add that companies need to properly evaluate their options in order to determine what is best. Also, if one is in position to architect their infrastructure in order to take advantage of the cloud, they should do so.

Next, Josh and Lele were asked about how they go about choosing the right platform for projects. They made sure to stress that needs vary for every client, and that the right platform for one client may not be the right platform for another. The two agreed that AWS has at times been an appealing option due to its many features. For projects where fewer features are necessary and cost is tight, Rackspace has been a good option. Josh and Lele also touched on the support that the various cloud technologies offer, and their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, Josh and Lele were asked to rate different platforms in terms of functionality, ease of use, response time, whether they would recommend the service, and what their satisfaction level has been.

If you’re interested in learning more about our cloud services, please contact us here for more information.