Second Level Engineering

DISTALOG LLC, established in Zürich, Switzerland, provides advanced software engineering support and services.

Top-tier software engineers are hard to find and expensive to hire. The DISTALOG model is to provide advanced engineering know-how on demand, at the time and place it’s most needed. Even if many companies would rather hire than outsource, we believe that any access to the level of engineering expertise we provide is better than none.

Some ways we can help you operate on your project, team or business to make it more successful:

Services

The first step of any successful software project is to break it down into manageable units with well defined relationships and organizational responsibilities.

• Requirements gathering:
  turn the initial business idea into a detailed set of technically usable requirements, leading the discussion between the users or sponsor and the technical teams.
• Architecture:
  starting with the requirements, map out the large scale structure of the application (its components and their relationships), and identify the tools, platforms and frameworks that will best support it. Deliver a set of artefacts documenting the results for the project team.
• Organization:
  find the right organizational structure for a project, that optimally balances control and freedom, for predictability, creativity and efficiency.
• Containerization:
  Containers are at the core of modern application management. Decomposing an existing or new application into a set of containers allows the use of application management environments like Kubernetes. Identify the set of required containers, set up the infrastructure to build them easily and continuously.

Efficient development processes, tools and teams are key to agility. We can help setting up or optimizing the tools and training your team. Here are some the tools we recommend and support:

• Build Process:
  The software build process turns source code, data and media into ready to deploy artifacts. It can be time and resource consuming for large projects and subject to compliance and security constraints like reproductibility. We recommend Bazel as an industrial-strength build environment and have years of experience with the internal Google version of it.
• Source Control:
  Git is becoming a de facto industry standard for source code control in projects of all sizes. Getting it right lets teams reach the optimal balance between agility in development and predictable, timely releases.
• Operations: _
  Kubernetes is transforming the way computing infrastructure is managed across the industry. It can make your application easy to manage with a minimum of human effort, and portable across on-premises and multiple cloud providers. Do not waste precious engineering time on routine operational duties !
• …:
  There are many more specialized tools we are familiar with, please reach out for more details.

Meeting unexpected or difficult challenges ? We can help overcome, with decades of experience in the industry.

• Scalability Issues:
  Reliable and cost-efficient scaling is key to growing your user base. Getting it wrong results in expensive, slow and unreliable service. We can get you past the initial small user base through to true web scale.
• Technical Issues:
  Debugging and fixing difficult technical issues is one of our specialties. This is where bringing in experienced second-level support really shines. You only pay for actual results.
• Compliance Issues:
  Today’s regulatory environment imposes an ever-growing number of constraints onto service owners. We can help you identify and tackle them through appropriate technical measures and tools.
• Due Diligence, Technical And Security Audits:
  Considering investing in or acquiring a company ? We can provide you with a detailed technical audit that will make sure you are putting your money in the right place. We can also audit your current system for potential technical or security issues. We identify potential issues before you become responsible for them.

Need battle-tested software development or process optimization know-how ? We can provide !

• Custom Development:
  We master the full software development cycle and can execute on any idea or requirements. We pick the most appropriate programming environment, tools and runtime platform for your needs and turn your idea into reality !
• Outsourcing Consulting:
  Considering outsourcing development or operations to an external provider ? We can help you pick the right one, acting as hired experts on your behalf to thoroughly evaluate the available providers before you commit to any of them.
• Hiring Consulting:
  With more than a decade of experience interviewing candidates for technical positions (more than 250 interviews for Google), we can help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Contact

Email us so we can figure out success together !