People of Quantrix Archives

People of Quantrix: Brian Cabana, Engineering Manager

Brian is the Engineering Manager and Lead Engineer for the Quantrix team and has been with the company for over ten years. He has actively participated in the design, production and testing phases of each of the releases of Quantrix since version 1.0. He currently manages the engineering team and is the lead engineer on the various projects for Quantrix Modeler and the Qloud.

Brian Cabana, Engineering Manager, Quantrix

What is involved in your role as lead developer for the Quantrix Modeler desktop product, and how has it changed over the years?

As Engineering Manager, I help manage the prioritization of issues and run the projects from an engineering standpoint, as well as other typical managerial duties. I also do a lot of coding of features, which I enjoy. I’ve been with Quantrix since 2003 and from an engineering perspective, a lot has changed. Java, the base language we code in, has improved. User interface design principles have changed, particularly in terms of migration to mobile devices. In that period, we’ve moved from being a desktop only application to the web, launching the Qloud, and continuing to move to mobile device. And we have had a lot of fun.

What is most important focus from an engineering standpoint?

Two things: usability and stability.

Talk about usability.

In the 1990s, usability meant, “Can you do it?” Today, it’s “How easy is it to do it?” That is a big shift. We want to make new users more comfortable using Quantrix. Power users love it, but we are working on making it more usable for more people. That means making things easy to find and easy to do.

Some recent examples of our work on usability include the recently improved launch panel and the major changes to the Dependency Inspector. Before, it was hard to understand what was happening in the cell. Now there are a lot of clues as to how it calculates, including the ability to hover over the formula in the dependency inspector to see the calculations. Another change is that when a user starts to edit a formula, it gets a green background. You know exactly what you’re editing. We plan to do more usability improvements like this as well as revamping some other tools.

How important is user feedback?

We have a great user base, and they provide great feedback. We also track when people call support. If they have a hard time doing things, we try to fix that in development. We try to be as responsive as possible. At one of our Seminar by the Sea events, a power user told us that it would be great to be able to select a range of cells and filter on them immediately. One of our programmers went home that night and coded up a proof of concept. We included that feature in our next release.

Have you always been a software engineer?

I served in the Navy on submarines. Then I became a high school math and science teacher. I went for a masters in computer science, and learned about Quantrix. I pestered the company founder until he gave me a job.

What do you do when you’re not coding for Quantrix?

I have a lovely wife and two young children. We love to go cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. I also love to read – I’m currently reading a fascinating history of Maine called The Lobster Coast.

People of Quantrix: Shane Davison, Senior Software Developer

Behind the scenes, a team of software developers works to add new features and functionality to the desktop and cloud versions of Quantrix Modeler. Learn about their priorities, and the technologies they use, in this interview with Senior Developer Shane Davison.

Tell us about your work at Quantrix.

Shane Davison Senior Software Developer Quantrix — Shane Davison

I’ve been at Quantrix for four years, and I’m a Senior Developer. That means I code software development for the Quantrix Modeler desktop application and the cloud-based version. We write a lot in Java code which provides a stable, mature platform for us to develop software. We constantly research and evaluate new technologies, but we’re very aware of the fact that people need to make sure their models will continue to work over time.

What does the team focus on?

We are always trying to make the user interface simpler. For example, we have made it much easier to share models on the web. We are always working on making the software faster, and more responsive. And we always love feedback on customers about what they want – people can contact us anytime with suggestions and ideas.

Tell us about the migration of Quantrix to the cloud.

We’ve had a web-based version for a while, but now it is much more full featured and developed. For our customers who don’t want to create or share models in the public cloud, we now offer an Enterprise Qloud version where companies can use Quantrix in their private cloud. One of the features is a load balancer that I developed to improve performance and scalability when companies have multiple users on the Enterprise Qloud.

How does the load balancer work?

If you have, say, 100 users accessing models, you want to adjust the server load to accommodate usage spikes at different times of year. Our Enterprise Qloud users can edit a configuration file to assign which machines they want to use for model servers. They can do it round robin, by which one has the most memory available, or any number of options. The load balancer will choose the server based on your criteria, and expand the model server resources available. Users set up their parameters initially, and the work happens behind the scenes.

Sweet! It sounds like you have a lot of experience.

When I was six, my parents got me a Commodore PET computer. The PET is in the Computer History Museum now! I’ve always been a computer person.

And what do you do in your spare time when you’re not writing code for Quantrix?

I like to go out and eat and sample new beverages. I love the variety and quality of restaurants in Portland, Maine, our headquarters. I also like to ski and take road trips. Maine is a great state.