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Data Maturity Accelerator

Data & Software Engineering

We are engineers, not coders or developers

  • Engineers participate in idea generation. We’re as invested in the “why” as the “how.”

  • We are “π-shaped” people with at least two areas of deep expertise as well as a breadth of knowledge and ability.

  • We have front-end, back-end, mobile, infrastructure, and data engineering capabilities.

Engineering principles

The beginning of a project may be the most glamorous phase, but the ongoing care of a product is just as important. At TXI, we embrace this reality. TXI engineers architect and write code to sustain the product’s viability for years to come. We value things that contribute to the health of technology, even if they’re unseen or less tangible: sustainability, maintainability, accessibility, adaptability.

You’ll find members of our team poking at things like security and dependency upgrades — things that won’t shatter the user’s world but that ensure that the tech and therefore the company that owns it is in the best possible position to embrace the next pivot.

Preparation is essential for innovation, and we strive to make sure everything we build and maintain is ready for the future needs of the business and its end-users.

At the highest level, TXI’s job is to manifest brand-new digital products in the world. We are creators, tinkerers, and architects, in the most literal sense. The engineering team embraces this identity wholeheartedly.

While the work of writing code is often considered rational, logical, left-brain stuff, we see it differently. Because our engineers have direct contact with clients from the earliest stages of projects, our role is a bit like that of an artist given a commission: we take fuzzy human expressions of need and turn them into tangible products. We deploy our coding skills to an immensely creative end.

We also see the work of coding as more than simply choosing the “right” option. There often is no “right” or “wrong”; there are too many forces to balance for clear-cut answers, and so we must bring creativity to our work to achieve our clients’ desired outcomes.

What's more, the engineering team’s job goes beyond writing code. We influence and help shape products from the earliest client conversations. Regardless of whether we are coding or not, our primary objective is to artfully solve problems that generate delight for all of our users.

Our engineers work in integrated teams with TXI’s design and product leaders. They collaborate with client teams to build together and learn from each other. We recognize that we are capable of better outcomes when we tap into the knowledge base we have as a collective and look to our engineers to contribute to definitional work, idea generation, and innovation efforts that exist outside of code alone.

Our focus on collaboration also encompasses how our engineers work together as a practice. Collective code ownership is a principle of Agile development, and we strive to spread the understanding and knowledge about a given project across our engineers.

We practice pragmatic pair programming, so while we don’t pair 100 percent of the time, we pair often. Pragmatic pairing amongst our skilled engineers encourages knowledge sharing and cohesive code, improving speed to value for the end user.

Engineering capacity in any organization is finite, but software innovation is an evolutionary process. While we’re often deep in code, we never lose sight of what our technical work is in service to, which makes us an enormously pragmatic group. We pride ourselves on our business acumen and empathy for users.

We are always working to balance the needs of users, the business, and the technology. Sometimes that means building with a proven tool so we can launch quickly instead of a more powerful new tool we’d have to learn. Sometimes it means making essential improvements iteratively, alongside the release of new features, when we’d love to do a massive refactoring upfront. Our goal is to navigate the complex space of technical decisions rarely taking a single decision to its extreme.

Nothing in the world exists in stasis. We embrace that reality and aim to work in a way that moves us continually forward.

The landscape of technology deployed in the service of custom solutions is vast and ever growing. Our focus is on learning and growth. We actively seek out new information and new technology that can improve what we build and how we build it.

We are committed to ongoing improvement: of ourselves and our skills, of our team and its operations, of the products we build and how we build them. We seek out and adapt to feedback. We also examine data from the products themselves to understand the ways users interact with those products and how we might improve them. This posture results in a team that is ready to hit the ground running in complex scenarios with skills at assessing what needs to be researched and decided early, and what is safe to be explored in the future.

Expertise

Mobile

Our award-winning digital team delivers a best-in-class mobile experience.

We work together to understand the user’s needs, motivations, and pain points. Once we identify the right problems to solve, our designers create a clean, intuitive interface to set your app apart. We pride ourselves in delivering products that both delight users and deliver the ROI you need to propel your company into the future.

Typical outputs include:

  • Product discovery
  • User research
  • Rapid prototyping
  • UI/UX design
  • Usability testing
  • Accessibility testing

How to build great mobile apps

Our mobile app development teams have worked extensively in both native iOS and Android, creating native experiences across a variety of industries.

We’ve also created mobile applications with cross-platform tools like React Native, which can deliver an even bigger bang for your mobile buck. With React Native, our teams can create a single set of code that delivers a high-level native experience for both iOS and Android. And having a single set of code that governs all platforms can save significantly on maintenance hours and costs down the road.

As the mobile tech stack evolves, we’re always researching new tools and tactics that can optimize performance and collect valuable analytics that can be leveraged to track set goals.

Our mobile tech stack includes:

  • Analytics
  • Usability user testing
  • Automated crash reporting
  • Deployment and Beta testing
  • Automated testing and continuous integration

Download a copy of our mobile stack

Technologies like the Apple Watch, smart jewelry and other wearable applications present the opportunity to put you closer than ever to your audience.

We understand how to create responsive, intuitive designs that unlock the unique qualities of the platform and open up new avenues for you to connect with customers.

How we can help:

  • Minimalist design optimized for wearables
  • Device integration
  • Device security
  • Performance and battery optimization

App development for wearables

IoT provides limitless opportunities for companies to scale quickly, ranging from automation of machines, remotely controlling access to physical appliances, and managing connected devices.

We’re constantly expanding our idea of what’s possible by bringing new products—and new revenue—to our partners as they explore the future of work with IoT.

How we can help:

  • Connect data-powered products and integrate data from disparate systems
  • Improve data integrity and automate manual processes
  • Remote access and control of physical devices, complex systems, and machinery
  • Real-time monitoring, notifications, and alerts

IoT and the future of work

The Internet of Things (IoT) adds connectivity to hardware so it can send and receive information.

IoT works best by creating communication and, eventually, automation across separate devices to run organizations better, faster and more efficiently. Once we start to explore the Internet of Things this way, our clients start seeing opportunities for IoT all over the place.

Applications of IoT:

  • Implement smart factory equipment
  • Logistics and wireless inventory trackers
  • Design an optimal toolkit for remote monitoring/tracking
  • Integrate data sources, including wearable tech solutions
The mobile tech stack is always changing

We’ve methodically tested all of the tools available to make the development, testing and deployment process as efficient as possible. Download the mobile development stack that we use at TXI.

Get the stack

Coding languages

Front-end (UI) and back-end (API) development

The client landscape is evolving quickly — with new tools unlocking new functionality. Our front-end engineers have deep experience in modern frameworks like React and Vue, so we can provide rich interactions that create unique user experiences. Our engineers most commonly reach for Typescript to add type safety on top of the core functionality of Javascript, helping to catch mistakes early while making development more effective and efficient.

React has become a go-to front-end framework on the web. It allows the engineers at TXI to create design systems with reusable components to accelerate and scale feature development. React, coupled with the functionality of Redux enables large-scale, feature-rich applications that are powerful and maintainable.

The engineering team at TXI has been working in Rails since its inception and has contributed to open-source projects like rspec and written books on testing in rails and accepting online payments. For organizations looking to integrate systems, process data, or pretty much build any kind of web application, we have the experience to guide you to the right solutions.

Node.js provides a path to work in one programming language in both the front end and back end. This reduces the cognitive load for developers to allow faster development speeds. Node.js helps reduce the technical requirements for clients to acquire as they build their engineering teams.

Python is the most common high-level programming language used by data scientists today. Python sits at the intersection of good developer experience (allowing developers to produce features quickly) and good runtime performance (making the web feel snappy and supporting scale). Having a common language between developers and data scientists brings these two disciplines together in a meaningful way.

React Native is an open-source framework for building mobile applications using JavaScript and React. It allows developers to create apps for both iOS and Android platforms using a single codebase.

Expertise

Infrastructure and DevOps

Infrastructure automation provides our clients with the ability to leverage the cloud to serve users at scale. We utilize Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, empowering our engineers to provide and manage many infrastructures. We focus on creating software development platforms that enable high throughput teams to build, deploy, and monitor anything they can imagine. DevOps strategy and automation give you the capacity to grow in a controlled, predictable way to keep operations smooth.

We are skilled in:

  • AWS
  • Docker/Kubernetes
  • CI/CD
  • Terraform
  • Chef/Ansible
  • Google Cloud

Why DevOps is important

I've been working with TXI for over seven years and in that time they've really helped Dickson transition from a manufacturing company to a technology company.

Matt McNamara, Director of Product Management at Dickson
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