Solliance - Brian Noyce

Background: Solliance is a consulting company as well that could be viewed as a competitor, but we have a business model where we have a large partner network of affiliates that we use to bring in experts on specific technologies or to build a team for a customer project. IdeaBlade provided two resources, Jay Traband (co-founder) and Steve Schmitt for a project we worked on together from March 2017- present. In addition, I have been friends with co-founder Ward Bell for over a decade from the developer conference circuit where we both see each other a lot and have a lot of overlapping skills and interest. I authored a Pluralsight course on their Breeze product in 2013, and another one on Angular and Breeze last year. So I've had a close working relationship with them for a while, but the project last year was the first and only that I was directly using them as development resources to build a customer project. I also did a couple projects as a resource for them a few years back teaching Angular 1.x and Breeze.

With our (Solliance) business model, we get to work with a wide range of skill sets in our partner network, from very cheap but not very productive/qualified offshore resources, to mid-level developers, to top architects and top experts in bleeding edge technology.

Given all that I can unequivocally say that the IdeaBlade resources were amazing talent I have worked with from our partner network and that it was an absolute pleasure to work with them. In short they always exceeded expectations. More so than any other customer project I can recall in the past 5 years (we founded Solliance in late 2012), as soon as the IdeaBlade team showed up to work, they were productive from minute one, they had very high expertise on the technologies we were using, in the few cases where we were using something they were not familiar with or had limited experience, they did not try to pretend they did. And in a couple cases where we still needed to have them work on something rather than bringing someone new in and ramping them up, the IdeaBlade team went off and ramped up on the technology on their own time, non-billable, and didn't start billing until they new they could provide value for their hours. So basically, in general... they rocked.

The rate for the two resources I mentioned was on the high side compared to what a lot of consultants will offer, but worth every penny - the value for their rate is outstanding compared to all other resources I've worked with across the rate spectrum. They are fast, effective, follow best practices with no guidance and build highly maintainable code, can interact and communicate clearly, understand customer requirements and never try to build more than is needed. So in case you see the rate they quote and think "that's high" - just realize your value per dollar will far exceed what you could get with most cheaper resources in my experience.

The specific technology stack we were working with included:

    - HTML / TypeScript / JavaScript / CSS / SCSS
    - Angular (2 through 5, upgraded over the last year from starting at 2)
    - BreezeJS
    - Breeze Server
    - DevExtreme UI components
    - Google charts
    - Bootstrap 4
    - ASP.NET Web API 2
    - SQL Server

Note: Use of Breeze was actually my decision as architect and fan of the product, they did not push for it at all, but I was certainly glad to have the guys who built it on the project, and the result was the ability to build out the CRUD data use cases of the app way faster than we could have without it. So if they suggest it, just say YES :)

I can't comment on their specific skills beyond that stack other than to say I would trust them with all things front end web and back end .NET (and I suspect their resources skills go way beyond that). And like I mentioned above, I would trust them to get the right resources on the right tasks, or tell you they don't have those skills and help you find someone else (possibly through our partner network based on our relationship with them but only if initiated by them).