The Reason for a Blog

Welcome to the inaugural blog post of the Nexport Solutions Engineering Blog. Many of you may be wondering who we are and why you would be interested in our blog. I hope to answer both points in this, our first blog post.

First, a quick story about WHO we are. Nexport Solutions is a division of Darwin Global, LLC (DG), a recent off-shoot of Advanced Systems Technology, Inc. (AST). Historically, AST has been in the business of providing software solutions and other services in the public or government sector. More than 12 years ago, AST began to explore the private or commercial sector. Recently, in an attempt to better focus on our commercial clients and partners, the commercial business split from AST into what is now Darwin Global. Nexport Solutions operates from Oklahoma City and provides Systems and Software engineering services to DG and its partners. You can find more details about the business of Nexport Solutions on the main Nexport Solutions Blog.

As an engineering group, we find ourselves solving many complex software engineering problems on a daily basis. These problems can be specific to writing code, coding patterns, configuration management, methodology development or just about anything else you can imagine that relates to our trade. I've long felt that we needed a better sounding board for our ideas and that we need to do a better job of contributing back to the engineering and software development community. So, my goal for this blog is to provide an outlet for our ideas and to share with the larger community our discoveries, opinions and general musings on our craft.

Every week, one of our engineers or QA specialists will publish an article on some topic that is relevant to our  team as a whole. We are an agile shop that develops primarily web applications in C#, HTML and Javascript. We practice test driven development as often as possible and believe in a highly automated configuration management system with Continuous Integration as it's core driver. Our stack of choice has been Castle::Monorail /ActiveRecord but we are in the process of slowly switching to MS MVC/NHibernate.

Over my last 12 years with this engineering group, I have seen our technology and methodology change dramatically. I have seen our software go from a combination of Classic ASP and ColdFusion to a fully distributed and cloud server architecture running on the .Net platform.

Finally, I am very proud of our team and the incredible software that they develop. I am regularly surprised by their ingenuity and as we begin to grow our blog I am sure you will be, as well!

About NexPort Solutions Group

NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.