CODE Terminology

Sometimes we speak our own language! Here are some terms you may hear around the office:

Austria – Land of schnitzel, the “Sound of Music” and Mozart. Oh, and this is where Markus is from and where EPS started. We still have an office in Austria.

Clockwork – Our internal timekeeping system. All employees and contractors are required to track their time in Clockwork since this is where we pull the data from to bill our clients.

CODE Consulting – Our main business involves consulting and writing custom software.

CODE Focus – Special issues of CODE Magazine, focusing on various technologies. These are often produced together with the creator of the technology (such as Microsoft).

CODE Framework – Our internal development framework, which we also make available to outsiders, free of charge and open-source.

CODE Magazine – Our awesome developer magazine.

CODE Staffing – Our strategic staff augmentation arm, which differs drastically from other staffing companies due to our extensive networks of professionals, backed by DevNet.

CODE Training – Our training arm. Now mostly a marketing initiative. In the past, we did this as a profit center and offered small training events and small conferences.

Conversion Projects – Many of our software projects involve rewriting outdated software. Often the existing software was originally written in Visual FoxPro. Several members of EPS were former Microsoft MVPs for Visual FoxPro.

DevNet – CODE’s Developer Network. A network of contractors who we have an established relationship with and who we can contact when we need resources on a project.

DEP – Developer Education Program. Periodic free developer training sessions that all employees and contractors are invited to attend. These sessions are given by various developers and are recorded so developers can watch them later.

Ellen Whitney – Co-owner of EPS, and in charge of all marketing and finances (among other things). You should turn invoices in on time so the person in charge of finances will pay you on time.

KavaDocs – A spin-off created by Rick Strahl and Markus Egger. KavaDocs is software for the creation of unified documentation consolidated from a wide range of sources, such as Markdown files in Git, TFS work items, HTML, and many others. At CODE, we use KavaDocs for some of our documentation needs, including our in-house software, infrastructure, and processes.

Maui – The Hawaiian island Markus, Ellen, and Rick live on.

Lunch with CODE – One of our marketing efforts where we go to companies and do a free lecture during lunch. They pick the topic and the food. www.codemag.com/lunch

Markus Egger – Markus is the founder of EPS and other ventures.

Mike Yeager – CEO of EPS. Mike runs things. You don’t want to piss off the person who runs things. 😄

Milos Solution Platform – The predecessor of CODE Framework.

Rick Strahl – Technically not part of EPS (he owns West Wind Technologies), but Rick has been Markus’ “partner in crime” for years. Rick and Markus started CODE Magazine together. Rick is also the master of all things web. Or, as Markus likes to tell him: “All he does all day is send strings back and forth over the internet.”

State of .NET – One of our marketing efforts where we do a free, half-day lecture about future technologies and which ones developers should be learning. We often do these lectures at Microsoft’s offices. www.codemag.com/stateofdotnet

Tower48 – A separate company owned by Markus Egger, Ellen Whitney, Mike Yeager, Simon Ferguson and Pierce Adkins that provides digital escrow services. www.tower48.com

Visual FoxPro – Developer tool popular in the past. Visual FoxPro is/was owned by Microsoft (after they acquired Fox Software) and was used to squash Borland. Remember Borland? Well… if you don’t, that is due to FoxPro. We have a long history with FoxPro. Markus even worked on the FoxPro team for a while. CODE Consulting still gets business from converting old FoxPro applications to more modern technologies.

Wikinome (formerly GeneSys) – Startup project funded by EPS Software that deals with processing genomic sequencing data, led by Otto Dobretsberger.

Xiine – A digital reading platform we championed before digital reading platforms were a thing. Unfortunately, a customer ended up owing us a lot of money, so we didn’t have the funds to push this the way we had planned. www.xiine.com

Unicorns – Sorry, we can’t tell you all our secrets just yet!!