Ex-Google employees focus on India amid expansion

After technology has become intertwined with our lives led by the COVID-19 pandemic, global companies must strategize on how to adopt tech as a mean to run a profitable company.

As business strategy and technology strategy has become coiled up, many corporate executives are finding that their organization’s past technology choices are limiting their strategic options and business agility, according to Deloitte’s Tech Trends report.

To resolve these technology limitations, these executives are finding it necessary to lean in to technology architecture and implementation choices to ensure the overall business strategy is supported by clearly aligned technology choices.

In Deloitte’s 2020 CSO Survey, most respondents (70%) rated disruptive growth as critical for their companies’ success, but only 13% are confident that their company can deliver on this strategic priority.

In a recent interview with AJ Ross, Chief Technology Officer at Fluxon, he speaks about his journey from Google to Fluxon and the future.

“I grew up in Alaska, outside of Fairbanks. It's in the Arctic, so we had long winters and beautiful, warm summers. I spent a lot of time building snow forts, tree houses, and jumps for my sled or bicycle. In the summer, we'd be out on the river, fishing,” Ross said.

As a kid, I never imagined being a software engineer. I thought I would be an astronaut. But I always had a passion for building things, whether it was getting the perfect shape on a jump or an elaborate snow fort, he added.

How did Fluxon come into existence?

We started Fluxon because we wanted to work on challenging, interesting projects with talented people. Erad, Ena, Jen and I (Fluxon’s leadership team) were friends and colleagues before, and now our team has expanded to a growing community of like-minded tech experts that come here to do their best work, while having fun.

What made you fellow Googlers get together?

We have always enjoyed working together, and starting a company together seemed like a natural progression. We share a passion for learning and becoming masters of our craft, and the environment we have built at Fluxon fosters that culture of continuous development.

Why do you think that there is a need for your company to exist in today’s market?

The magic combination of talented people and effective process is essential to consistently delivering new software applications and services. Fluxon’s core strength is in building incredible product teams and effectively operating the development process. It is something that every organization struggles with, large or small, and we bring the team and proven approach to get the job done.

What type of tech and algorithms do you use?

We are pragmatic about our tech choices and work with a variety of technologies. We focus on selecting the right tool for the job, and are not ideological about any one technology.

We love working with Typescript and React on the frontend, and have gotten a lot of mileage from next.js. Modern platforms like Firebase allow us to implement highly scalable, secure, applications with much less effort than in the past.

We are comfortable with a wide variety of technologies and have worked with Angular, Ruby on Rails, Django for Python, Java, Golang, C++, and many more.

What are your views on the world of tech during the pandemic and can you give me your insights on the future?

The pandemic accelerated the digital migration, and more and more business workflows are conducted primarily online. This shift to remote work is here to stay, as many companies are already seeing the advantages and efficiencies to be gained.

Fluxon was a remote company before the pandemic, and we’ve built a culture that supports this model, providing the right tools, processes and values needed to set up distance teams for success.

What would you like to change about this industry?

Technology is primarily a service to people. It's easy to forget the human impact of a product, process, or policy, but empathy and understanding for the user is essential to building tech products that have a positive impact. One of the things we've set out to do at. This means asking why, not just how, and creating an open environment where teams feel empowered to ask tough questions.

How do you keep your data secure?

We focus on security during all stages of product development, including data safeguarding, risk assessments and follow Open Web Application Security Projects (OWASP) development practices.

Security is baked into everything we do, from planning to maintenance, which ensures we can remediate any security issues early on in the development process.

We work across many industries, including healthcare, and are also the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant organization.

What are the recent developments at your company?

Fluxon is growing rapidly, and we are accelerating our hiring, with a focus on India, Europe and other markets.

We’re also working on expanding our benefits to include some exciting and unique opportunities for our teams that will launch early next year. On the client side, we've really enjoyed working with companies such as Pluto and Eraser to create new online experiences.