An Introduction to Summit Technology Group with David Graves

Speaker 1: Good morning, guys Okay, cool. So I'm going to give a trivia for you guys to spell my name. Um it's called Lakshmi Naranan Govinda Swami Tulasi Daran. If you can pronounce my name and I'm going to give a gift card to you guys I go by LG. Life is good. First of all, thank you for being here. And it's a great organization to be participating. I think uh Uh I'm sure that this is a productive conference for you guys. I was really surprised to see that there are people across the world who have traveled for this conference. I'm really surprised. I do a lot of shows in the last uh uh year almost 25 shows but this is the show I saw people from Spain, from Portugal, from Brazil, from Canada, from India. I'm really kind of intrigued by the people who are be part

Speaker 1: want to be part of this community Just to a quick background about submit technology. First of all, we are a proud sponsor of this. We are a diamond sponsor. I think the second year we are doing this. And we want to continue this further. Just to give you a quick background, Summit Technology is a 15-year-old company. We work with financial institutions and non-financial institutions. uh help them modernize their uh platforms and solutions like cloud engineering, cloud modernization in a simple we help them from closet to cloud. And then in the last three years, as you know when the pandemic hit, When the US government wants to give the money to the people in this country and also there are a lot of restaurants who want the money. So government has to put a platform together. We are the one who built the platform for the whole country. Last year, I think we're given more than $30 billion

Speaker 1: in money through our platform. This is a one-of-a-kind and we built a platform, Python and Django, and we have hosted AWS So that's why we are here because we built the platform and definitely they will talk about uh how we built it, what kind of challenges we faced and uh why we are here and uh and thank you. And now you're going to win AUCLUS. We did a uh challenged uh uh last two days about the best uh coding thing so uh at the end of it we'll announce the winner.

Speaker 2: As uh LG said we're from Summit Technology. We use we use Django extensively in our All right, perfect. Uh we use Django as our our primary platform, so really we're here because uh Because of Django. I mean for all you all you guys uh hard work to to to build Django, we really could not have built our platforms without it. So as LG said, one of the one of the platforms we did last year was the Restaurant Revitalization Fund for the SBA. It was a $28. 6 billion fund authorized by Congress. It's basically free money for restaurants. There's more than 660,000 restaurants in the US. We had about 21 days to implement it. I don't know any other

Speaker 2: I've used other platforms, uh Java Spring. Some others that, you know, there's just there's no way in any other platform that that you could we could have built this this program. At the time we had seven back-end developers, three UI developers. We were a small company. And So some of the basic considerations that we had to had to uh put together is, you know, aside from just bringing up a platform, there's so many, so many complexities, multi-factor authentication. We had password history. We had a really complex application that was part of this process that restaurants had to come fill out. Internationalization, we had to support English and Spanish language.

Speaker 2: We had APIs that Square and Toast actually had available to upload their information. So they were also parallel building kind of a platform to fill out these applications for their users. and integrate back to us to report that information to the SBA. We had several third-party integrations, including Twilio, who's here, DocuSign Plaid. We had to integrate with the IRS, which actually was kind of like a uh more of an analog integration because uh they required us to like fax some information over uh which and all this is going on right in the middle of tax season so I'm sure they were uh flooded with stuff. Uh then we had an integration with the SBA's platform, which is called etray on that kind of uh uh

Speaker 2: accepts that information builds builds the uh uh um the the grant in this case usually it's used for their loan programs but uh we had we had to account for massive fraud because I mean You got thirty billion dollars and everybody wants it's it's free money, so everybody wants it right. Uh so we have to make sure how do you keep out uh unwanted people. Um we had they had a whole review process that had to build had to be built to kind of review the documentation and and make sure there was no fraud. We had a to prioritize applications. There was a uh mandate in the law that veterans and women and and other um

Speaker 2: sorry, losing the words right now, other um Uh yeah, other disadvantaged groups um had priority to the to the uh to the money. Uh and then we had to we you know we realized early on that Some things are gonna go wrong, we're gonna have to disable some functionality on the fly. Um so we built that in, and then you know, just performance. Like like I said, there were 660,000 restaurants in the US. There's never really been a program like this. How many how many users are we gonna get? So This is kind of talking about that uh disadvantaged uh the women's veterans, disadvantaged uh individuals that had priority.

Speaker 2: I took this screenshot off the SBA website. So there's a priority period days one through 21 where those those groups had to uh priority to the money and then after that any other any other applications that were out there would would have access to the money. So can anybody guess how long the the $30 billion lasted? So within within thirty minutes we had allocated all over thirty billion dollars. Um like I said it was actually twenty-eight point six that was We had to continue to accept applications for it was at least the next week, but you know, if you weren't in that first 30 minutes, you you basically were probably not going to get them.

Speaker 2: any money. So within ten minutes we had two hundred thousand users logged into the system, uh filling out applications. And like I said, within thirty minutes that that money has uh been allocated. So on top of that, just as part of as part of our mission, we kind of we we like to build open source products. We open sourced a lot of our work. contribute to other application to other uh projects like Django Tenants. Uh we've got some um PRs out for uh rest framework and one more I can't think of it right this second but uh as far as part of our Oculus giveaway uh Ed Revis you're the winner are you in are you in here Ed

Speaker 2: Yeah, Ed 's right here. Yeah, come up here and get your picture, Ed. And thank you for everybody that had time to uh I know it's like you're here to have fun, so thank you for taking time to to uh to do that. And and the other people that had submissions, if you would, we have some water bottles for you at the at our table. So if you'll come by and and pick one up, we'll we'll be glad to give it to you. Also, we're hiring. So if you're a Django developer or a front end developer, we use Vue pretty heavily on the front end. And Django is most of our back end. So if you're if you're looking for a job, we'd be glad to talk to you. All right, thank you.