DTEK Consulting Services Ltd.

About us

DTEK Consulting Services Ltd. is an established software development consulting company, with a fifteen-year history serving the I.T. community in Alberta, Canada.

When hiring a DTEK consultant, you, the client, get dependable software development expertise that comes from experience, on-going training, and a commitment to professionalism.

Professionalism in I.T.

DTEK's core company values are built upon a foundation of I.T. professionalism. We support professional I.T. certification through CIPS, Canada's association of I.T. professionals since 1958. To become certified by CIPS, in addition to following a rigorous application process, an I.T. practitioner must abide by the CIPS code of ethics, and must uphold responsibility to the I.T. profession. The ITCP certification from CIPS has been reviewed and accredited by the International Federation for Information Processing as meeting the internationally recognized, vendor-neutral, IP3P standard.

DTEK's company policy is to encourage, motivate and support our consultants, to acquire and maintain professional I.T. certification through CIPS. Thereby providing you, our client, with the highest level of trust and integrity for our services.

Our business model

DTEK’s business model is for consultants to alternate between providing consulting services to clients, and keeping their skills current by completing professional development activities such as training courses, projects, research and development. Our consultants typically work with one client at a time, and dedicate all of their effort, to only that client.

When completing professional development activities, in addition to independent study, courses and training, our consultants work on research and development initiatives (see below) to build upon and grow DTEK’s internal I.T. systems, experimenting with and exploring the use of software engineering and design principles, for practical business uses.

Research and development initiatives

Recent research and development initiatives include AzureDev, the Online Store, and Online Shopping.

AzureDev

The AzureDev project, was created to explore the Azure cloud hosting platform, which resulted in the website you are currently seeing. This website serves as a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of migrating dotnet web-based applications currently hosted on premises with IIS in Windows Server, and reprogramming them to run serverless in the cloud. It also serves as the company's corporate website; and as a reference application for Azure development using C#.NET.

DTEK Online Store

DTEK Online Store was research and development initiative to create a recreational shopping experience website. It explores approaches to building an eCommerce website with a React front end, hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. DTEK Online Store also serves to explore common well known eCommerce web development patterns, such as the shopping cart, and how to implement them with React’s component state management.

To be clear, no actual commerce is conducted through the DTEK Online Store. No money, or goods and services are traded. It is a simulation of a shopping experience — a recreational activity. It allows the user to "buy" all kinds of things without actually spending any money. It’s based on a controversial belief that the activity of shopping itself, is therapeutic.

DTEK Online Shopping

DTEK Online Shopping was a complete ground-up rewrite of the DTEK Online Store, using Angular as the front end. This version was primarily created to explore the differences between React and Angular; and to explore the use of AI paired-programming to reduce the amount of time and effort needed for the coding, to rapidly learn new technology, and to provide high quality source code deliverables. This version provided an opportunity to explore the use of asynchronous programming techniques utilizing RXJS observables, and the ue of the Redux design pattern for state management. While the DTEK Online Store used only custom CSS for styling in order to explore new powerful techniques like Flexbox, the DTEK Online Shopping app used Bootstrap 5. Given AI's tendancy to produce random code that may or may not work, two approaches were used to mitigate this risk:

1. The use of test-driven development — AI was used to generate thorough unit testing with Karma and Jasmine achieving nearly 100% code coverage. In this way, AI provided a check upon itself. To take this one step further, explorative manual testing was also performed through the use of the browser developer tools, Redux DevTools, and good old fashioned print statements using the JavaScript console.
2. the use of a multiple sources — AI prompts were given to both ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot, as well as being independently verified using conventional Google searches.

More Information

If you would like to learn more, full documentation for the AzureDev project and for the DTEK Online Store are publicly and freely published online, and to take this one step further, the source code for DTEK Online Shopping was published on GitHub as an open source project.

• AzureDev project documentation
• DTEK Online Store app, and documentation
• DTEK Online Shopping app, documentation and source code

The source code for these, and other, internal company projects are not published, in order to protect proprietary company information (with the exception of DTEK Online Shopping). However, our consultants have full access to the company’s internal source code repositories, and are encouraged to apply the expertise from our internal code base, to help solve difficult problems encountered on client projects.

From humble beginnings

Conclusion

By providing the benefits of decades of experience, on-going training, and commitment to professionalism, DTEK Consulting Services Ltd. is able to provide you, the client, with the trusted assurance of dependable, high quality I.T. consulting services.

References

1. The Canadian Information Processing Society
   https://cips.ca/about/
2. CIPS code of ethics
   https://cips.ca/wp-content/uploads/CIPS-Code-of-Ethics-2022.pdf
3. ITCP certification
   https://cips.ca/certification/
4. International Federation for Information Processing
   https://www.ifip.org/
5. IP3P
   
   • https://www.ipthree.org/gain-ip3-accreditation/ip3-accreditation-program/it-professional-standards/
   • https://cips.ca/2021-itcp-receives-ip3-accreditation/
6. AzureDev project documentation
   https://rob-das-win.azurewebsites.net/html/README.html
7. DTEK Online Store app, and documentation
   https://rob-das-win.azurewebsites.net/Documentation/OnlineStore
8. DTEK Online Shopping app, documentation and source code
   https://github.com/robdas1/ng-shopping