Custom Software Development in New York
Lineate helps companies go from myth to reality with custom technology. Handling billions of transactions and terabytes of data, our technology solutions have enabled companies like The New York Times, AppNexus, and NYU to achieve their goals for over a decade. Whether we’re rolling out a custom CMS that populates over 2,000 websites, providing complex loyalty offers or creating something completely custom, our expertise falls into three main categories:
- Building the tech solutions companies need to achieve their goals. - Improving and optimizing the technology companies already have. - Supporting in-house development teams with our own experts & resources.
Lineate works with companies across all verticals, including martech, adtech, fintech, e-commerce, and more. To learn more about how we can help your company, visit us at www.lineate.com.
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Reviews
the project
Data Lake & Warehouse for Shopping Review Platform
“The quality of work and the profiles that were assigned to the project were not what I was expecting.”
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there?
I am the CTO of a shopping review platform.
What challenges were you trying to address with Lineate?
We are trying to create a platform to gather all data from our warehouses. We have a lot of different data sources in our organization that have no connection between them, so basically it was an effort to create a data lake and a data warehouse to attend to our reporting needs.
On top of that, we are also trying to enhance our customer experience with better recommendations and algorithms so we wanted to use this data lake and warehouse to create our own machine learning algorithms.
What was the scope of their involvement?
We started off with a mini project that consisted in the generation of an output based on a bunch of records of one of our clients. After that, we were supposed to start with the data lake project; the first project lasted longer than expected so they are still working on that.
After talking with them, they agreed that they hadn’t assigned the correct profiles and that the project had a lot of flaws; recently they removed everyone from the project and changed all the profiles, and started leading the project a lot more.
As for technologies, almost all of our databases are on Amazon, although we are about to migrate to Google, so we are limited on the technologies and decided to use Java.
What was the team composition?
According to the original proposal, I was supposed to get a full-time senior data engineer, a 50% QA specialist, and a 50% solution architect, plus a project manager and a 5% technical advisor.
In the end, we got a full-time .Net developer, a 50% developer that was supposed to do QA, a project manager, and we didn’t get the solution architect. There were about 4 or 5 people in total. We were not happy with that. Currently, we have the profiles that had been promised in the proposal.
How much have you invested in them?
We’ve spent about $80,000 so far.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working together in March 2021, and our work is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We really weren’t happy at first, having been assigned the profiles that were promised at first and not having the quality of code that we were expecting. When I expressed my disappointment, I received a call from their CEO and they took care of the situation and reacted; maybe it was not as fast as I had liked them to react, but when they did, they were strong. They took the time to analyze every single line of code, review the processes, and they put a lot of effort into trying to fix this, which was appreciated.
How did Lineate perform from a project management standpoint?
We had some issues because the project extended a lot more than expected –– that was partly because our client made changes but also because there was no clear leadership from the Lineate side. I had to take over many parts of the project myself because it was a chaotic situation.
The quality of work and the profiles that were assigned to the project were not what I was expecting. They assigned developers instead of data engineers and their experience didn’t match the needs of the project. In the end, we were able to fix that but it did cause us a lot of issues. In general, their project management is old style, and they should really update on agile practices.
What did you find most impressive about them?
There was a lot of effort trying to fix the issues we had.
Are there any areas they could improve?
They could become better at data engineering in general; they promote themselves as experts in data engineering and, in my experience, they had more developers than data engineers.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Interview the profiles before you get them. Be very sure of which profiles you are getting and if they match the needs of your project.
Lineate’s work has not met the original expectations. The specific resources that were outlined in the proposal were not the ones that were allocated at the onset of the project. While Lineate’s CEO has reached out to remedy the situation, this project is currently not where it was intended to be.