Why Butterflyvista? (Alternate Take)

There are many things, which separate us from the rest. We see that again, and again. We here at Butterflyvista have no peers. A few paragraphs do not even begin to show that. Contact us and let us show you.

That being said, here is a glimpse to the answer to this vast question.

Our founder, Sarah Weinberger, received her engineering certification from UCLA. She later did master's work in computer engineering at USC. Microsoft certified her as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer multiple times over, as well as on numerous Microsoft products. Oracle, formally Sun Microsystems, received certification on Solaris. She received certifications from other prominent vendors, as well. She also was a beta tester for numerous companies, and has been a Microsoft Partner for many years now.

Outside of technical expertise, she studied graphic design, photography, business, and plays classical violin having been part of orchestras for many years. She is involved in politics and the community.

We have had projects from large and small companies alike. We are no stranger to engineering having worked on the landing gear software of Boeing aircraft, worked on producing drivers of various sorts, such as printer drivers for the HP Laser Jet, worked on radar systems software for the U.S. Air Force, on numerous web projects, storage related projects, and much, much more.

Our staff is equally talented. We are proud to have someone, who has vast expertise in video shooting and editing, audio recording and editing, composing, and playing various instruments, such as the accordion, piano, and keyboard. This person is also experienced as an engineer and has been the front-man at numerous trade shows.

The biggest thing that separates us is not the technical, as any trained monkey can do technical just by watching YouTube or making YouTube your friend. It is not evening working with operating systems, since 1982 and various levels, such as kernel and user space. What separates us is:

• Vast experience
• Being able to put various pieces (components) together
• Our holistic approach
• Taking responsibility and admitting limitations
• Ability to do research and craft solutions
• Writing, teamwork, and as Einstein would say perspiration
• Humility

I will close this question by saying, if you were to need open heart surgery, would you trust a so-called expert in another country, who is cheap, a relative, a kid still in diapers, or would you want the best? The software component is as necessary to business as a good doctor and takes more experience and expertise, as the process never ends. It is a never-ending story, a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.

Many people can compose, but how many people can compose Beethoven's Symphony #6?

What will it cost?

We do not bill on a flat per project basis. We bill hourly. Our average rate is $120/hour, however that does not mean that you will not pay less or more. Much depends on the particulars.

We do our best to keep costs down and keep informed every step of the way. We are mindful of the cost.

Consulting is different than W2 based income, as consultants must pay employer side taxes in addition to regular taxes. Included in this fee is equipment costs, office, sales and marketing, and many other costs. The industry standard is that these incidental costs is about equal to twice the pay, maybe more. That means that the consultant realizes about half the pay at the end. All that presupposes a full day, not a partial day.

Software engineering is not like making a crepe or a coffee, nor does it have that volume. (I should add that neither is cheap. A single crepe averages around $12 and a large drink at Starbucks can cost northwards of $5.00. Both literally take a few seconds to prepare too.) Much like a composition or writing a book, each work is unique and no two are alike. Software is next to and rubbing up against penning "The Great Gatsby" than a crepe or putting on new tires on a vehicle.

Please contact us to discuss your project and we can give you an estimate.

Comparison to other consultants

This question is virtually identical to why you should use Butterflyvista, so I would ask you to read the answer above.

Beethoven, Mozart, and John Williams are household names and their works are known the world over. In modern times, what has John Williams not composed? Many people may not know Robert and Richard Sherman, but everyone knows their work. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious anyone? Butterflyvista has also and participated in many software projects stretching the gamut from A to Z and a lot in between.

Being able to put different pieces together, harmonize them, and make music out of things that do not sing is what separate us. We take notes and splotches of paint and make something that you will like and not only use, but use over and over again.

99.9% of the world will not know (and could care less) what a universal printer driver is, who created the concept, named the product, and developed the product (all us), but that does not mean that everyone does not use it and benefit from that work, just like, or even less than, many people do not know that Robert and Richard Sherman are the brothers behind much of Disney's famous music. Kiddies decades from now will still sing: "It's a small world".

Contact us on how we can help you.

What are your expertise?

Over the course of several decades, our experience runs the gamut, but all related to software development. We also have ongoing hardware experience, both at the PC side with network and domain management (IT) and with electronic boards, as we have worked fairly continuously creating embedded software for various devices using various operating systems.

Suffice it to say that we are as experienced working and manipulating bits than we are macroscopically working with software components and packages. We have worked with many different types of people at various levels of technical knowledge. What is true across the board is our desire to educate and explain what we are doing at each step of the way. An informed customer is a happy customer. That does not change if that is an individual at a desk in his/her cubicle where we are making a change to their QuickBooks and Epicor software packages or to the COO of a company keeping him/her apprised of progress.

Services for small businesses

As a small business and having worked for small businesses, Butterflyvista understands your needs quite well. We understand cost constraints and that you are good at what you do, but are not a software developer.

We can work with human speak or with forms, which you may have, and craft together with your help a solution that not only meets your needs and expectations, but exceeds them. If we see something, which you did not call out, we will point that out.

Our specialty is being able to understand diverse things and putting together the pieces together to create a solution. For instance, we can take a complex WordPress theme based on a framework and marry that to a plugin capable of providing the site with multiple languages selectable from a dropdown, just to give you one example.

We can create a web application that can support your business in the way that you do your business. QuickBooks and Sales Force are great, but that is overkill for small business and these products do not conform to your business, such as the needs of electrologists.

The desire to hire someone from Russia or one of the cheap software developer sites is tempting, but that cost you more in the long run. Contact us so that we can talk about your specific needs. We will be honest of we can help you or not.

Services for large companies

Sarah Weinberger and Butterflyvista are no strangers to companies, having worked both in commercial and military environments to various specifications on a wide range of products.

Butterflyvista provides a wide range of offerings from embedded software, to application development, to other services. Please review our service pages. The easiest way is to hover the mouse over the Service menu item and peruse the various pages.

As stated in the Why Butterflyvista section on this page, Sarah Weinberger is multiple engineers rolled into one package with decades of experience working in the software arena on a wide range of products and technologies.

We invite you to contact us, so that we can give you an honest assessment of how we can help meet your project needs.

I grew up watching and gravitating towards Star Trek, first the original series and then Star Trek: The Next Generation. In subsequent years, I watched Smallville, which is the story of Superman before he put on the cape, and now other series. What all these series have in common is technobabble. I watched an episode of Supergirl the other day, where the solution was to relay a signal using the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in the 1970s and communicate with another star system in real time both audio and HD video. Viewers buy that bullshit up. That at least is a more reasonable sounding babble. Arrow and many other shows throw words around that make no sense. Viewers are okay with that, because they do not know any better. They are not engineers.

I am quite cognizant of technobabble and when someone with whom I am talking does not understand, so I slow things down and make sure that you are on the same page. That is true on day one and day 100, if the project lasts that long. There is no technobabble. I do not give people what I hate. Life exists in facts, reality, and truth and from that everything flows. I will not promise you that I can twitch my nose (think Bewitched) and poof a solution. That is Hollywood, but not reality. What Butterflyvista can do is put together different existing pieces and use our knowhow to reduce development time.

What you must understand is that software engineering is not like putting on a tire, not that auto mechanics are great on estimating even that, or flipping a burger at a fast food restaurant. Each solution is unique and each problem is unique.

For the Technically Inclined

I started off technical life working on mainframes, writing software technical documentation for military based products, writing HP LaserJet printer drivers for the IBM PC, working on embedded projects, working on mainframes (PDP-11, IBM 3033, etc.), and learning Pascal and BASIC languages. From there, I branched into Windows development with the SDK and Windows 2.0 and network administration. My degree is in electrical engineering and my master's work was in Computer Engineering.

Embedded, network engineering (MIS), application development on various operating systems, and many other areas continued over the years, so today, I am unlike many in engineering today. I have worked for military, commercial, big companies, mom and pop companies, and for myself. I understand how things go together and how to grasp diverse situations. I am not frazzled by problems, as I have had those every day for as long as I can remember. I know the procedures and methodologies to not only figure out the answer to the problem du jour but do that in an optimized way. One just has to work the problem.

Operating systems from the regular to real time do not phase me, as I have worked on MS-DOS, IBM OS 2, UNIX, Linux, Apple, Solaris, and of course Microsoft operating systems. The SATA/SAS Maxim expander board that I worked on used Thread X as the real time operating system, so we toss that in. In my early days, I worked on other platforms too. Does anyone remember the Commodore computer? As I recall, I worked on other operating systems too. Pascal made way for VB and C/C++/C#. I am no stranger to assembly language and working with bits. I created quite a few websites as well from full stack WordPress to many direct HTML to Microsoft .Net websites, mostly using WebForms, and I did quite a bit of work using LAMP. Visual Studio has been a constant, as has been the DevExpress framework.

The point here is that I am truly multiple engineers rolled into one and capable to work on your most challenging project. I also bring creativity, my music side having studied classical violin, graphic arts, and a love of photography. Obviously, gender studies and appreciation are part of that, as is my love of Star Trek (or used to until CBS/Paramount decided to trash the franchise).

Please peruse the website and better yet, contact me, so that we can talk about how I can catapult your project to completion.