Welcome to the PlatinumSolutions blog.

PlatinumSolutions is a software development company that I co-founded in 1999. Since that time, I have had the privilege of working with some of the best minds in the software industry, on projects that are vital to national security, public safety, and the health and wellbeing of US citizens. We have an incredible team of software developers, engineers, and data management experts who routinely “do the impossible” in areas as diverse as codebreaking, image analysis, computer forensics, and mission support. Our team is called in when a customer has a particularly challenging problem that absolutely must get solved quickly - often after one of the large software contractors has tried and failed. It has been an incredibly rewarding six years, and I am looking forward to many more.

Since 1999, PlatinumSolutions has grown by a 114% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), and we were recently ranked at number 18 on the Washington Technology Fast 50 list for DC metro area small businesses, and number 1 in the Systems Integration category. We are a CMMI Level 2 company. PlatinumSolutions was recently profiled in the Washingtonian 2005 “Best Places to Work” issue.

This is our elevator speech:

PlatinumSolutions creates software that saves lives. Our software helps the federal government monitor terrorist communications, arrest violent criminals, and improve the safety of prescription drugs. We develop custom software based on open standards and an agile methodology so that our clients can quickly respond to a changing world.

Why blog? It seems that quite a few companies are getting into blogging, with mixed results. Some companies are so restrictive on their blog content, that nothing good makes it out to the public site. Other corporate blogs just don’t have much to offer. Or the marketing department uses the blog as an advertising platform.

I am certain that we have a lot to offer, and that a blog format can work for our team. We have done some truly pioneering work on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. Our developers have contributed to a number of projects in the open source community. We have experience in some very specialized areas of computing that I think would be of interest to a lot of developers. And we have some unique insights into the software development process. We are fanatical about improving the way in which we write software - doing things like employing CMMI methodologies in an agile development environment, automating software builds and unit tests, and practicing an iterative, collaborative development process with clients that change direction (and requirements) very quickly.

So rather than sharing code snippets, best practices, and war stories on our intranet, we have decided to push all of this stuff out to this blog. Let’s see what happens.