I'm Sean Corfield and I came here for an argument

As you might guess, we held a contest at Broadchoice to name the blog and the fact that "ArgumentCollection" got the most votes probably tells you a lot about the team! I'm excited to work with these guys - I've admired their work for years and they are very talented so I'm expecting the bar to be raised several notches. And they're nice guys to boot.

I'm the Chief Systems Architect at Broadchoice and my role is to help coordinate the work that Joe, Brian, Ray and Nico do so that we can all be as effective as possible and to ensure that we don't duplicate effort as we blaze our respective trails through the three core product verticals: Behavioral Analytics, Demand Acceleration and the Collaboration Platform. Underpinning each of these is a core set of services and objects that support each of these verticals and, from a code point of view, that's my main focus.

As Joe indicated, analytics is going to be core to our products and this is an area that has always fascinated me. Back in the early 90's, I worked for a software QA company that wrote source code analysis tools and we calculated a lot of software metrics. The most interesting aspect was using exploratory data analysis to discover patterns in the software metrics to identify similarities between bodies of code and outliers in a given body of code. These techniques allowed us to quickly zero in on unusual pieces of code or relationships between modules and highlight potential problems in the source code. I'm looking forward to being able to apply similar techniques to the metrics we can derive from user interactions in collaborative business software!

In the past - before I got involved in web applications in 1997 - I worked a lot with compilers, interpreters, code optimizers and all sorts of "system software" (included database engines and some embedded telecoms stuff). I like programming languages and worked on one of the first ANSI-validated C compilers and was an active member of the ANSI C++ Standards Committee for eight years. I've even designed and implemented my own programming languages "for fun". Broadchoice is primarily a ColdFusion shop and I like CFML a lot (enough to be the chair of the recently announced CFML Advisory Committee) but I believe in using the appropriate mix of tools for any given job.

Our initial tech stack is Model-Glue + ColdSpring + Transfer, as I've mentioned before, with Java on the backend for integration with a number of systems. As you might gather from Joe's posts, we're broadening that to include Flex on the front end (for analytics) and Groovy on the backend as appropriate, to leverage Spring and Hibernate for improved performance (and to make it easier to run parts of the application "in the cloud"). As a company we're very supportive of Open Source Software and the team will leverage a broad range of open source tools and systems as well as continuing to contribute back to the community through the various projects that each team member was already working on before Broadchoice. You'll also see us at conferences and publishing articles and so on. That's core to the company ethos - we hired these guys for what they do and we don't plan to change any of that!