Volutico, IT consulting for small businesses

Volutico is a family-owned IT company dedicated to meeting the requirements of fellow small businesses.

With expertise in the design, development, deployment, monitoring, and security of web applications and networking services, we leverage technologies such as Rust, Go, lightweight HTML/CSS/JS, Linux, CloudFlare, HAProxy, Varnish, and state-of-the-art algorithms and cryptography.

In brief, should you wish to connect with us, kindly reach out via email at volutico@gmail.com and we'll be delighted to arrange a brief call with you.

Thank you for the interest!

If you've landed on our site through a referral from one of our valued clients, we extend our sincere gratitude for their generous recommendation.

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How may we be of assistance?

The answer is contingent on your unique business needs. Our approach is entirely customized to suit your specific requirements. Leveraging our extensive years of experience and valuable insights, we strive to devise solutions for any challenges you may encounter or innovations you wish to introduce to the market. Our method involves attentive listening and a comprehensive exploration beneath the surface to identify the optimal solutions tailored to the distinct needs of your business.

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Allow us to introduce ourselves

We are a small family business consisting of Ciprian Craciun and Andreea Pitici (accompanied by our most discerning critic, our small daughter Ema). :)

Over the past decade-plus, we have primarily focused on providing consulting services to a select group of small clients, addressing their diverse IT business needs.

Prior to this, dating back to around 2006, we accumulated experience in various facets of the IT field. Our journey included roles in a large corporation, conducting research, administering the network for a university, and even teaching at the said institution for a few years. Throughout this period, we witnessed the ebb and flow of technologies, observed fads and trends come and go, and actively engaged with a myriad of them.

Before delving into the ways we can assist you, it's crucial to emphasize that we are not transient freelancers seeking quick gains. Instead, we are committed to cultivating enduring and robust relationships with our clients, transcending the boundaries of mere business to establish genuine friendships. We firmly believe that this approach benefits both parties, fostering a high level of trust irrespective of our engagement level, be it a few hours sporadically or a full-time commitment spanning multiple years.

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What have we contributed to?

When it comes to projects, our commitment to stability and enduring relationships has led us to engage in a select number of long-term endeavors. Within these projects, we've tackled a diverse range of issues, each presenting its own unique set of challenges and solutions.

These projects span from Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems to cloud-based platforms and infrastructure management and security.

Because our dedication to IT extends beyond a profession to a hobby, you're invited to explore our open-source projects on GitHub github.com/volution or peruse our personal blog at notes.volution.ro

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  • EMR (Electronic Medical Records) system for the healthcare industry;
    (encompassing design, architecture, development, deployment and operational aspects;)
  • legal compliance platform addressing GDPR and related aspects;
    (focusing on deployment, operational aspects, and the development of specialized services;)
  • email marketing for a former leading eBay integrator;
    (involving deployment, operational aspects, and the creation of analytics and reporting functionalities;)
  • cloud-based platform for application development and deployment;
    (a research initiative during the early days of cloud technology;)
  • online realtime bidding platform;
    (providing architectural consulting, stress testing and benchmarking;)
  • prototyping a data-analytics platform tailored for auditing firms;
    (covering development, deployment, operational aspects, and data-ingestion;)
  • various data-mining projects to extract actionable business intelligence from extensive data accumulations;
  • internal business tools for the sales and network design teams at a major telecommunications company;
  • designing and implementing disaster recovery and backup system for a large data-lake housing highly confidential and sensitive files;
  • consulting on security, cryptography and privacy for various colleagues, partners, and clients;
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What have we accomplished?

During our journey, we've tackled a diverse range of technical challenges. In summary, we've developed comprehensive system architectures, designed intricate web-based user interfaces, optimized cloud deployment costs, managed the deployment, monitoring, and security audits for Linux-based applications, optimized SQL databases, created NLP and business analytics tools, overseen network infrastructures, and implemented robust backup and disaster recovery systems, among various other tasks.

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  • designed or audited comprehensive system architectures, encompassing the selection of appropriate programming languages, databases, cloud services, and middleware, while ensuring seamless integration of all components;
  • designed and developed complex user interfaces, both web or desktop based;
  • lowered expenses in cloud computing by optimizing applications and transitioning from costly SaaS solutions to self-hosted alternatives;
  • optimized delivery of web-based applications, employing strategies ranging from caching and CDNs to advanced HTML and CSS techniques;
  • deployed, monitored and operated applications throughout their lifecycle, predominantly on Linux machines within a cloud environment;
  • implemented robust security measures and lockdown procedures for application deployments;
  • conducted security and performance audits for various implementations or deployments;
  • developed NLP (natural language processing) models for speech-to-text then text-to-structured-data transformations;
  • implemented business analytics data-mining;
  • engineered reporting tools to extract valuable insights;
  • designed and optimized SQL databases for enhanced performance and resource usage;
  • provided end-user support and training;
  • employed cryptography where data security was paramount;
  • employed anonymization techniques for databases during debugging to prevent the leakage of confidential data;
  • worked under stringent HIPAA compliance standards;
  • patched and compiled customized versions of the Linux kernel to better align with our specific requirements;
  • researched and employed various sandboxing techniques for running untrusted code;
  • successfully navigated through migrations from on-premise hardware to cloud-based VMs;
  • designed and implemented data pipelines for ingestion, processing, or reporting purposes;
  • briefly managed the network infrastructure for a university;
  • designed and implemented backup and disaster recovery systems;
  • captured logging and tracking for long-term storage and analytics;
  • experienced both successful and challenging business endeavors, occasionally pivoting 180 degrees;
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Technologies in our toolkit

Our primary emphasis revolved around crafting and deploying web applications, websites, and network services within a Linux-centric cloud-based environment. We have utilized languages such as Java, Rust, and Go, with a keen focus on reliability, cost efficiency, and resource consumption. Our approach extended across the entire technology stack, encompassing kernel tuning, application optimization, and culminating in load balancing and CDN integration.

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  • for actual development, we've leveraged a diverse array of programming languages, spanning from the widely recognized Java, Python or Ruby, to high-performance options such as Rust or Go, delving into more esoteric choices like Erlang or Scheme, and even employed low-level languages like C or C++;
  • regarding databases, our expertise extends to PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, ClickHouse, SQLite, DuckDB, BerkeleyDB, MongoDB, and exploration into NoSQL alternatives like CouchDB, Riak, Memcache or Redis;
  • in frontend development, we extensively utilized GTW, while also emphasizing lightweight HTML/CSS designs with minimal JavaScript to enhance performance and user experience;
  • we've employed both ORM's, such as Hibernate for Java, and highly optimized SQL;
  • our deployment predominantly relies on Linux (also our daily driver OS), with brief forays into FreeBSD and OpenBSD; we leverage systemd, Podman, or KVM where appropriate;
  • extensive use of shell scripting, and a bit of Ansible for automation; supplemented by our in-house developed automation tool;
  • VM deployment primarily on AWS, Linode, or Hetzner; (with all their proprietary technologies related to VPCs, storage and firewalls);
  • incorporated various SaaS solutions like AWS S3 (and compatible), AWS RDS, AWS SES, etc.;
  • email delivery via AWS SES, Mandrill, SendMail, and other platforms;
  • employed VyOS or Mikrotik for network routing, and Wireguard or OpenVPN for security;
  • optimized web-based delivery through CDNs like CloudFlare or AWS CloudFront;
  • utilized HAProxy for HTTP/TCP load-balancing and TLS termination;
  • utilized Varnish for increasing cache hit-ratios;
  • applied state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms and schemes;
  • research novel genetic algorithms, well in advance of AI becoming a widely recognized buzzword;
  • expertise in license compliance and compatibility of various OpenSource and FreeSource variants (especially GPL, LGPL, AGPL and more permissive ones like Apache and MIT);
  • leveraged Git, GitHub and BitBucket, alongside AWS CodeCommit for source-code hosting;
  • employed Jenkins or in-house solutions for CI, periodic automated tasks, or other tooling;
  • collaborated through Trello, Trac, Slack, Discord, and good-old-email;
  • we'll also mention in passing the ubiquitous HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, XML, and associated technologies;
  • developed custom tools and libraries when alternatives or existing solutions fell short;
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Have we piqued your interest?

We certainly hope so! :)

If our approach aligns with your needs, kindly reach out to us via email at volutico@gmail.com. We would be delighted to arrange a brief call to delve deeper into your specific business requirements.

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