20 Years of Innovation: Reflections on Triple Helix Corporation's Journey

[Music] [Music] hello everyone I'm Jason Bitner from triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joined in studio today with my two senior developers Andy Webster and Sam Sheldon hey guys how are you doing today hey hey we got a very special podcast for you guys today uh triple helix in 2024 is celebrating its 20th year in business we started the company in 2004 and coincidentally this is our 20th podcast and so we thought hey why not bring the two together and uh give you a special episode what we wanted to talk to you guys today was about how triple helix started uh where we came from what we did in the beginning and after 20 years where we are now and where we're going so you know just for me a brief intro I founded the company in 2004 and you know when we first started triple helix 20 years ago it was a very different technical landscape back then um the technologies that we all take for granted today were not quite as prevalent and we actually started as

just a regular simple traditional web design house we were doing the static websites for folks making their marketing sites for the companies and very very humble beginnings and what we found over time was around 2008 20089 night time frame is that uh Yahoo site Builder came out where you could buy uh and host your own websites for uh 8.95 a month and let me tell you if your companies are realizing they can just do their own websites for that little amount it would became very difficult to sell traditional professional website design services and you know at that point triple helix was at a Crossroads you know do we try to keep working against a commoditized offering or should we try to do something different and it was that point I realized triple helix really needed to live up to the name of what triple helix meant if the metaphor for triple helix is that triple helix is a uh if you think of companies and their business data in the DNA of a company is its business data then triple helix

adds the third strand of DNA to make those companies more intelligent and for us it was like pivoting away from websites into web applications where it was more about the data for the company that really mattered more more than what the websites and the forward- facing marketing sites were doing so with that we had our very first what I would call Genesis of our web applications where we had a company that was doing engineered services and they were actually getting hammered on the phones by their customers asking when their orders were going to be ready and they actually had that data internally on a um Microsoft access database but nobody knew that what the status was and we just decided to take their for forward facing website the marketing website and we allowed um the data to be uploaded six times a day from access to the new website and voila they were able to log in and uh find the status of their orders and the call volume dropped over 90% in like overnight um and for us that was

a real key milestone in that now these websites were intelligent now we were able to provide and give uh some real value to these companies Beyond just a fancy pretty static website so Sam and Andy have actually joined me on my journey they're actually my uh longest running employees uh at triple helix and they represent the basically the the the evolution of where we started and where we're coming to in that instead of websites being static now they're intelligent and you know over the years it's been a good 20-year Journey Frameworks that we use to write applications that run these websites you've evolved considerably even in the Last 5 Years alone we've seen some tremendous tremendous changes and I would say the success of triple helix is really bound on the fact that instead of just static websites we run web applications and the Frameworks that those applications are built off of really really change the landscape of what we can do um Andy and Sam I'll turn to you and ask you know

what can you talk and tell our listeners about is the evolution of these Frameworks where we started about five six years ago as to where we are now yeah I can start with like when I so when I started here we were um pivoted to a framework called ye which um is a good good framework it's just you know it was really good for getting things up and going quickly it had a really good built-in like tabular data kind of sorting view um honestly the uh there was only a couple of problems that we had with that which is why we pivoted later but um overall you know much better than just using like a homebaked a home baked framework um which uh we had been kind of using some some kind of homegrown ones prior to that but and we pivoted to ye for a while and uh that kind of gets makes us so you can stand up an application really quickly um it handles a lot of the you know gnarly wiring stuff that you would have to you know waste time on otherwise and then we trans transitioned into uh larl in the past

what was it was it two or three years ago Sam something like that um it would have been about the same time that I came on which I think would have been 2019 so it's been almost fu years we've been we've been using laral for a while okay so that's wow five years yeah um and then uh transition into laral which is great because it's like it's kind of a lot more open whereas when we're starting off with ye it's a great framework but it also if you need to do specific um kind of uh edits to to the way the whole basic framework works then uh you know you'd have to uh go through a little more effort to make it work the way you want it to whereas Lille is more like um an engine that you can you can operate on easily not like yeah I'm making car analogies now [Music] but every every time you talk about programming there's got to be at least one bad car analogy it's required Sam your experience with the Frameworks and where we've been and where we are now yeah so I came on I think around the time

you were phasing out ye because it was no longer getting updated I know there was at the time we used E2 at the time there was talk of e3 but that was years ago and there's still been no there's been no further talk of it really so I think it's been pretty well supplanted but yeah we've been using laravel pretty much since I came on I think since version six we're coming up on version 11 and just a couple days now but yeah it's been it's definitely nice to have that just Bedrock layer of here's all the database interactions you know URL management things like that a whole bunch of stuff that we just don't have to think about when we work on things we don't have to worry about you know oh shoot what kind of database is this how am I supposed to interact with it it handles all that and on top of laravel we use other you know we also add other Frameworks like Tailwind CSS to make our front ends look pretty and Polished and standardized we use Live Wire which is another thing added on top

of laravel that basically lets us do all of the you know responsive web design the other good thing about Frameworks is that there's a ton of stuff you can add that's designed for that framework and it's all just seamless there's packages for charts for tables for all kinds of things and while you do need some programming knowledge to be able to use them effectively it's a whole lot easier than having to roll it yourself and it saves us a lot of time and effort yeah absolutely and another thing that was a great change from y to Lille is Lille has a much larger space for that like there's a lot more um you'd call them third party packages but like um you know like for example things like uh twilio or Shopify you know like things like that they usually will have like some kind of a an add-on for larabel if it's because it's a it is a bigger framework and so and also in that um you know when we bring um new people in we um a lot of times people will have had experience in lville because it

is a bigger package so it makes it just easier all around to uh kind of smooth out our development process no that's an excellent point and you know just for that purpose of of explaining the Frameworks and what they really help us do is you know imagine if you were a builder for like I say a home a residential home and the framework represents the foundation and the initial walls and they're already prepackaged and done so before you're even actually um building the house you start with really most of the major components of a of a software application are already completed for you and they what you typically do with leveraging the framework is you actually put the insides of the house together the walls the treatments the counters the furniture and whatnot using and that in this metaphor that's the business logic what the actual application needs to do and the framework is helping you build that so the time it takes to do a custom software project where in the initial days you were doing

everything from scratch every time now you do it in fractions of the time and because it's all built for you and the helpers are actually built in to actually add those components it makes it so much easier one thing I did want to mention is that these Frameworks are very good for two things one we can augment systems which if you're a manufacturing space the enterprise resource planning software systems that these companies use to run their whole companies they're not perfect and so many times they can't get functionality they want these Frameworks are perfect for bolting onto and actually extending functionality and we typically call these things in parland reporting layers being able to extend functionality reporting is usually a very big part of that but what's also nice about these Frameworks is they can stand alone all by themselves and because they're that power powerful you can actually use them as a replacement or as an alternative to an Erp system particularly if clients aren't

ready for a full up Erp they want to grow with the solution you can start small and build up with this and Andy and Sam I know you've had experience with doing both we've actually built applications where they bolted on and they were reporting layer esque or you have applications where it was the only application and it does everything for the company talk to our listeners a little bit about the experience and what's the difference with both yeah so a lot of the first things I worked on as I think a lot of us had are reporting portals um I think the first one that I worked on I don't know that we tracked anything other than user logins on our side and the nice thing about using a framework for it was I could just say Okay I want to connect to the Erp database and then I could just go query everything from there Pull It in nice and simple just display things in tables sort them filter them all that good stuff but yeah and I think Andy you're the one who was in charge of the uh I think the

biggest Erp replacement thing that we did that was basically an access database oh gosh yeah that was yeah yeah yeah that one uh we we took like a um we took an access database and extracted all the data from it and then um converted it into a new application and so in that you know we had to um change some things but overall very uh very successful you know because you know access databases as they grow larger and larger they don't become very efficient and they slow down and they start to just Bo bog up people's systems and the file gets bigger and bigger and so um um you know in that case we bolted it into a new uh an application with uh you know a mySQL database running in the background so it's much faster and uh much more customizable in that um and also it's Central so you don't have um like copies of the database copies of the same database all over the place there's one database in one spot and so um you know that was a big Improvement uh for them no that's that's actually a really

good point I'm very familiar with that project what what we refer to is when we take an access database and we actually convert it to a full-up web application is called the digital lift um it allows us to transform how the company is doing business with access databases you're not you're not wrong about how big and convoluted they get but they also self-c corrupt over time to the point where you could actually lose the entire application which has happened um so when we do these digital lifts which is a full up web application entirely it becomes in this company's example their Erp system it lets them run the entire company and what's really really cool about this is you get them what we call a phased approach we get through a phase one one application their Phase 2 phase three phase four everything they build on to it after the fact just gets so much better for them because they realize that they can literally have a blank canvas of functionality in fact this particular account is actually

going into a phase two uh with us right now and they're completely transforming the workflow um they're going to have full visibility to text service text in the field this is a service business uh but moreover they're going to have um ultimate visibility to what everyone's doing and the texts have visibil ility uh to communicate now whereas before they rely on cell phones and paper literally sent through the mail to communicate so this is going to be a very important upgrade for them all facilitated by these Frameworks um so you know going from websites to Frameworks into you know all the evolution of things you know before we pan out I'd just love to get both of your feedback on like where do we go next we've talked Great Links about where we are where we are now but what do you think is going to happen for us in the future uh AI and and all that kind of space how is that going to transform what we do now into the future I can't really speak to AI That's pretty well outside of my wheelhouse

I know there's a lot of things that we could do with it I'm not 100% sure it's there yet AI is really powerful but also really unreliable right now that said I know that as we've been you know looking to improve how we make web apps we've been talking about moving into Javas script Frameworks rather than PHP so that we have websites that are more responsive and snappier things that maybe could work on mobile I know we've done we we've used JavaScript Frameworks to make mobile applications before and I could see us moving into web applications that have more mobile components for some of our clients I could see that working well um I know that's the big thing that I've been looking at for our Evolution but Andy I know you've looked a little bit more into AI than I have yeah I mean a little bit I mean I I've I've used it for some simple things I um you know I I would never put um any kind of data in there because you know it's all it's harvested and it's brought up into some place where

they analyze it and whatnot but um you know for simple things like you know make me set set me up an HTML structure for blah blah blah and then it kind of sets you up a basic framework you know you could say like set me up on HTML table with 30 columns that's Auto spacing using Tailwind something like that and it might be able to do that and kind of um write otherwise mon semi monotonous code for you but it's it's not there yet like you said what you're um what the the piece that you were referring to with JavaScript Frameworks I think that is kind of a direction that we're moving towards not that we would ever totally abandoned like backend kind of server based stuff because that is good and solid and stable but but like for um for a front-end user experience it makes things feel a lot more like it's happening in real time versus you know you click the button and then you wait and then you see something happen it makes things snappier for uh the front-end user experience which uh is good

and also um JavaScript runs on a lot of different stuff a lot of different mobile applications so it's um it's flexible in that sense and it isn't as if we don't use JavaScript we use that pretty regularly that's a component of Live Wire it's we've always used it but a JavaScript framework is more heavily like building it into our application as a core part rather than just utilizing it for specific discrete things no absolutely um you know from my own perspective looking at you know where we are and where we're going you know the Frameworks I think are going to continue to evolve and get easier and easier for us to use Andy I think you're spoton with AI for us at least in the short term being able to give us things that are more repetitive or more monotonous having the AI generate code for us but you know we are going to get to a point where we are actually going to be able to ask the AI to generate the application for us and being able to um use the tools to make us more efficient and

make the workflow and obviously the end product that much better for the C client because we can focus on the things that AI can't do um which is always what Ai and automation is intended to do um but having said that you know just to recap you know again triple helix 20 years in business and you know it's been quite a journey um and I really want to thank all of the people that got me here and got us here you know great um employees like Sam and Andy uh as well as our great partners and customers who you know we never like I never expected to see where triple helix is today back at the beginning I don't think anyone can actually say that but I can honestly say we got here because of all of the support of our customers and our partners and our people they are really the success of triple helix so for me to everyone who has supported us on our journey thank you we couldn't have gotten here without you um and for today I just want to take special thanks to my uh two partners here in studio

Andy and Sam uh for they are senior developers they are among many of our other employees they are the heart of triple helix what makes this company so great and so thank you both for being on the podcast with me and thank you for being with us on this journey and so uh that's all our time for today so if you like what you heard and you want to hear more of it please be sure to like share and subscribe down on the channel below and until next time this has been Jason Bitner from triple helix on the Helix Insider podcast thanks everyone [Music] goodbye