abstractR

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the representative of the non-profit organization CTIT which associates companies and universities in the field of financial technologies. My position is FinTech Project Manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire abstractR, and what were your goals?

One of our goals is to provide information about companies operating in the field of financial technologies. We are also preparing strategic documents built on reading thousands of pages of different papers.

To get this work done we used to spend a tremendous amount of time looking for various resources and manually researching thousands of pages of text. The objective was the automation of this process so our staff can do more productive work.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Good references were mentioned by our friendly FinTech company that had already cooperated with the vendor.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We got the final application hosted on our internal server which can be used by our team. This application is scraping the defined websites and summarizing desired information by its own model designed by abstractR and their cooperating ML company.

The project was divided into 2 steps. The first one was about creating scrapers suitable for our purposes. The next one was about extracting the right information from texts and displaying them in a user-friendly UI.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We communicated with the assigned project manager, then he distributed our issues to their team composed of specialists in scraping, ML, and UX.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We are really happy we had the software made because it can save up to 70 % of unproductive time spent by reading all the articles and documents.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

I would say it was not hard to understand our needs. A more complex problem was to ideally set up the machine learning processes to be able to fulfill our needs/ information from the texts we need. There were no problems with their communication and adherence to the established schedule.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I like the approach of abstractR. They told us at the very beginning which issues they are able to cover with our new software. For instance, it was not possible to implement scrapers for a few of the many resources we wanted our database to be filled with.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of the company developing investing software, we have about 20 employees and strongly cooperate with universities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire abstractR, and what were your goals?

One of the most burning problems in investing process is correct tax counting. In every country in the world, the rules are different. As a part of our services, we provide tax counting based on reports from brokers.

The problem was, that we counted everything manually, which was really time-consuming. As a result, we hired abstractR team to develop a custom solution that could handle our needs.

Our needs were composed of:

• reading different reports from a selected broker in different formats
• finding relevant information
• counting the intermediate calculations and delivery of final values for tax returns
• delivery of a user-friendly interface.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Our colleague recommended representative of vendor due to the previous cooperation on financial software. We needed a result-driven partner that was able to understand investing context and rules.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The project covers all parts, from design, architecture, all the way to implementation, user testing, and work in the gathered feedback. The deliverables contain both frontend and backend with database storage, input data are persisted using block storage.

The frontend is written in VUE language, it communicates with the backend part using API, which implements the business logic of the app. Backend and business logic are written in framework Django, using Python language.

API part is enforced with WSGI framework Gunicorn due to performance considerations and Nginx is used as a web server for API.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were 5 people in the core team. Mostly we communicated with a project manager and designer of UI. The team also included 2 backend developers and a front-end developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The amazing deliverable is, that all the process of tax counting is automated now. The supplier delivered the final counting solution (bullet c) first, then we discussed a bit more how the intermediate calculations to be able to approve that the tool is counting right, but we fine-tuned everything in the short-time process.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The time management was really good. At the first meeting, the team understood our need, so only the small calibrations in the project description were needed. When there were some essentials for discussion, their project manager asked us for a short call and we agreed on the right solution really fast.

We worked in 14-day sprints, after each sprint there was a one-week period for incorporation of feedback. Supplier met deadlines, we used Skype and GitLab.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The cooperation and communication were really well-organized and in comparison with other suppliers we used in past, we could count on adding the created features to our products according to determined plan.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

We only had to wait a while for the start of our project, but since they had free capacity for us, everything went well.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Company does software development for small midsize companies mostly in EU region. I'm CTO of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire abstractR, and what were your goals?

We were developing solution for one of the major auction sites in the EU region. One of the asks of the client was a service that would allow comparing auction items/auction prices from various other market places in the near realtime fashion. This was not part of the original specification, so we ended up looking for subcontractor that could deliver some kind of distributed crawler engine, so we could focus solely on the interpretation of the data in the original system.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

At first, we did approach local subcontractor we had past experience with, but unfortunately the cooperation failed in early stages as they did not have enough experience with the cloud platform our customer was using. After this experience, we put an add to local b2b marketplace, where we asked specifically for someone with previous experience on the platform and picked abstractR (mainly because of their review and the fact that they were active contributor on the forum associated with that marketplace).

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Distributed web crawler. The requirements were one control node with simple web interface, where administrators could easily add new websites to crawl, the crawled content would later go to through various user defined processing pipelines. One of the requirements was to be able to dynamically spin new crawling nodes on the cloud platform used by the customer. Technologies used: python (implementation) celery (work distribution) redis (bloomfilter) lxml (html processing) elasticsearch (storage of processed data for later querying)

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

2 people, founder and person responsible for web services development

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

They completed the project on time. Budget was exceeded by a little bit, but that was per our previous mutual agreement. Time was our most important constraint. Asynchronous architecture abstractR came with shown very good results and allowed to save on some hardware budget.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

It was enough to meet only once a week in the local coworking space. When we had any additional questions, we usually used IM to clarify the details in real time. We used shared git repository, so we knew exactly what was going on for the whole time.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The flexibility and communication. Although the company was very small at the time (I communicated directly with Mr. Pylypenko), he was able to respond even outside of regular business hours. After the experience with the previous subcontractor, it was clear from the beginning that Mr. Pylypenko had actual previous experience with distributed computing, so this made the communication very easy.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I can’t think about anything I wish was done differently. After my previous experiences with various smaller software vendors, I treat every finished project as a huge success. This project was finished ON TIME and w/o any extra costs, which is kind of unprecedented in my limited experience.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm Head of Product for a leading CRM for small businesses.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire abstractR, and what were your goals?

As CRM, search engine is crucial for our users to find the data they entered and make sense of it. We hired Sergii to help us build an advanced search engine that will support complex rules and filters across multitude of data fields and millions of contacts our customers have. The goal of the project was create indexing engine, query language to support groups and rules for search filters (e.g. companies with revenue under X and located in San Francisco), and to respond in under 2 seconds for databases with up to 500k contacts.

SOLUTION

How did you select abstractR and what were the deciding factors?

We selected Sergii because of his expertise in elastic search, his attitude and his willingness to work hard to solve this challenging problem for us.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

1. Index fields from our MongoDB into elastic search (numbers, strings, text, addresses, etc.)
2. Build an engine that will sync contacts to search with minimal delay on any update.
3. Implement rules logic and APIs to support queries by multiple criteria
4. Implement faceting and full-text search for a specific set of fields (like education, titles, locations)
5. Implement suggestions engine for specific set of fields (tags, companies, etc.)

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Only Sergii

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The engine Sergii built was powering our search for multiple years and was backbone functionality that our users utilized daily. It was handling millions of queries a day and was stable. Sergii did a great job of documenting his work and our internal team was able to support his solution even after our contract has ended.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We used JIRA for task management and had daily stand-ups 5 times a week. Sergii communicated well about timelines and was overall very easy to work with. Despite the huge size of the project, Sergii split it into chunks and multiple deliverables, so we never had any downtime on production and minimized the risk of feature rollout.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

How much they care about delivering the best result for customers. They went above and beyond to find the best solution and worked very closely with our product team to accommodate for changing requirements.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing major. We are very pleased with their work.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the representative of the company. My position is Managing Director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire abstractR, and what were your goals?

Quant Systems company is a research and an expert courses provider. The company provides advanced courses for financial analysts who want to improve their financial engineering skills. Our customers gain knowledge both in financial asset pricing and statistical methods. For educational and research activities is vital need to have rich and reliable procedures for data harvesting and storing.

The goal of the project was to design and implement automatic pipelines for regular ETL process. One of the most important requirement for the design pattern of the pipelines was to be modular for future extensions.

SOLUTION

How did you selectabstractR and what were the deciding factors?

Personal reference.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We were provided with backend application hosted on on-premise server. The application is manageable and operates either via gitlab-ci or github actions CI/CD tools. This application manage ETL for our other applications. The project was divided into two steps: design proposal and integration.

In the first one we collect all requirements (scalability up to 10000 time series every day, time constraints, events, key parameters for ETL process regularization) and then we received design pattern and technical proposal (parallelism, using Spark for heavy lifting, CI/CD tools). The second step was about implementation of the aforementioned (including tests).

How many people from the abstractR team worked with you, and what were their positions?

3 – product manager, data engineer, software architect.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

ETL process is a crucial part of our infrastructure. Thanks to the project we are capable of scaling up our data series pool from 100 companies (tens of thousands time series) to 3000 companies (millions of time series processed daily). Expressed in volumes: ~5-10 GB to >150GB.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

I would point out their assistance during the planning phase of the project. The consulting activity was really valuable, because it was hard to understand our needs and the consultants help us to clarify our notions. During the planning phase we also receive really valuable technical advice improving the the future application performance. Project management tools was on a fair industry level: Jira, Slack, git.

The delivery was set up in sprint framework. Every sprint takes two weeks and was end up with short demonstration.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

As mentioned above, the most valuable thing was their ability to understand our needs and help us before their implementation. I believe that’s unique and I personally (as a person responsible for technical solutions in Quant Systems) appreciate it.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

In short, we, as a company, do business analytics in the cloud. My position here is as a principal engineer and metadata architect.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire abstractR, and what were your goals?

As a company with a huge number of projects saturating a big number of computation nodes, we wanted to have a Splunk plugin searching for outliers to predict unwanted system or customer behavior that could lead to bigger issues.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I was not a part of the process.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had a kickoff meeting with the manager and developer where we describe our needs. We prepared logs for prediction learnings and after several iteration, we got results with the final presentation.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

One developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

As a result, we got a working Splunk plugin with the required functionality. However, due to internal processes, we did not use it in the end.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The project was not mission-critical for us, so we ends up with regular status meetings with updates.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Nothing unusual come into my mind.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No