About us - Hire us
Ra-Ajax is maintained by Ra-Software AS. Ra-Software is a privately held Norwegian company with
two employees, Kariem Ali in Egypt and Thomas Hansen in Norway. And we are available for hire.
Kariem Ali
Kariem is from Alexandria, Egypt he was born in 1982 and has been working together with Thomas almost since the
beginning of Gaiaware and Gaia Ajax Widgets. Kariem has extensive experience with COM, the .NET platform,
DotNetNuke, Ajax and JavaScript. In addition to extensive knowledge of Unit
Testing, with a special touch on Unit Testing for Web GUI using tools like WatiN and so on. He has worked with
System Development since he was 12 years old, first as a hobby, later in his grown up life as a professional.
He speaks English and Arabic fluently. Kariem is a great system developer, very dedicated to delivering quality, loves
to give great service and lives to please :)
Thomas Hansen
Thomas Hansen is the founding father of SmartWin++, Gaia Ajax Widgets and Gaiaware AS.
Thomas have mostly developed libraries his entire carreer with a special focus on Ajax, Open Source and
Open Standards. Thomas is born in 1974 in Norway and speak Norwegian and English fluently. Thomas is
the copyright holder of Ra-Ajax and also the founder of Ra-Ajax - together with Kariem. Thomas has
worked with everything imaginable in the IT industry; ERP systems, CRM systems, ORM libraries, C++,
COM, Database systems, C++ GUI libraries but his heart is warmest when he does Ajax. Thomas have
been doing System Development since he was 8 years old which now is 26 years ago. Thomas have been CTO
of his own company which he himself founded (Gaiaware), working with consultancy, done coaching, overall
architecture, done teaching and tutoring and mostly everything imaginable.
Hire us
We are both available for hire through the company Ra-Software AS which is a Norwegian privately held company
mainly focusing on system development on consultancy basis. If you would like to hire us then
send Thomas an email and explain the job you would want to get done
with some few words and we'll pick it up from there.
You might want to check out our testimonials to see out what other people
who have previously hired us thinks of us.
Qualifications
We are both experts in Ajax development, and of course probably the best resources in the world on Ra-Ajax - since we
are creating it, but in addition we also have expertice on different technologies like ORM, design, architecture,
process, team building, DotNetNuke, WinForms, C++, C#, VB.NET and practically anything you can think about though
with a clear bias towards .Net technologies. We are available for hire either individually or as a team. You will
be billed by the company Ra-Software AS which is a Norwegian company located in Porsgrunn. Both of us have developed
code for computers since long before we were teenagers. We can do mostly anything
that has to do with System Development, including Training, Coaching, development, projects, management, C#, VB.NET,
C++, Web, WinForms etc...
Hire community members
In addition to ourselves we also have a growing community of dedidacted users, contributers and evangelists
whom some of are also available for hire. Often you might even get lucky and find someone who lives just next to
your own business which makes it possible for you to actually easily see these people without having to organize
a flight across half the world. And in some occassions these community members have slightly different profiles
than us which might fit you better than hiring us. Below you can find some of these dedicated
Ra-Ajax community members. Most of them use Ra-Ajax on a daily basis.
Rick Gibson
Rick lives in Tehama County about twenty miles from Chico, CA. As he says, "One day I stumbled across Ra-Ajax
and I’ve been very excited about it every since". He is a seasoned programmer, working with Microsoft technologies
with 14 years of hands-on IT experience. A proficient problem-solver who envisions business and technical
perspectives to develop workable solutions. A motivated achiever who guides organizations in applying technology
to business settings, provides added value, and creates project deliverables in a timely manner. A desire to
stay current with changes in the industry. Rick can be emailed at; rick atat crystaldatabases dot com.
Remove the spaces, change the dot to "." and the atat to "@". See
Rick's blog
Starting your project with an Ajax Starter-Kit
Often when you start a new project it might be difficult to know which end to start in. You may have a clear picture
of how you want your first page to look like, but you don't really know how to "start it". We can do such jobs for you
in such a way that we keep the copyright for the work we do and you get free usage for the stuff we create for you.
Then when the job is done we would create an Ajax Starter-Kit out of the solution and
provide it for download to other customers of us. In fact all of our Starter-Kits are created using this method.
And since we keep the copyright for the work we do there are also incentives for us to maintain the kit meaning
you'd get free updates to these starter-kits for 12 months running from the day you get the Starter-Sit.
Price for such custom Starter-Kits starts at $500 and goes updwards to normally less than $5000 depending upon the
amount of work you would like to get done. For a "one pager" it would normally cost you less than $1000 while for
something more advanced like e.g. a "CMS Starter-Kit" with full DB support and all that would cost you significantly
more. (obviously)
Still none the less you get the "cheap price" since we keep the copyright for this work, and you also get free updates
from us since that would create incentives for us to maintain the thing for free in the future.
Have a look at our existing Ajax Starter-Kits to see what you can expect.
All existing Starter-Kits we've got are also available for purchase if you don't want to use them in "LGPL form".
Starting from $29 which gives you full usage rights for one project with as many developers as
you wish on that project. To purchase existing Starter-Kits, go to our Ajax Starter-Kits
page and see if there's something tempting you there :)
Price
We are expensive! At least if you think of what you're paying us per hour of work we're doing. But System Development
is not like conventional engineering. System development is a highly creative work and the more experience and passion
you've got for it the better you are at delivering value for your customers. I think Paul Graham is perfectly correct
when he says that; "95% of all great projects and code on the planet is delivered by 5% of all the developers".
And we (Thomas & Kariem) definitely belong to that 5% lot...
After all, when developers get stuck, they come to us...
This is why we prefer to not work on an per hourly basis, but rather deliver fixed cost prices to our customers because
then they can compare the cost of the value they're getting from us with the value others are giving for the same price.
Then if we spend a fraction of the time delivering the same or higher value and at the same time spending a fraction of
the time delivering that value - then you earn on the end product - while we get higher rates than "the average".
So while yes, we are "expensive", but still "expensive" is often more cheap. Who would you take financial advice from
if you could choose between getting it for free from your grandma or pay Warren Buffet $1000 per hour? Or who would you
have paint your ceiling, Michelangelo for $1000 per hour, or your nephew for $10 per hour? Who do you think would end
up being more expensive for you?
Also when you deliver IT systems the real cost of that system is maintenance, 80% in fact according to several financial
analytics companies. We deliver high quality code for you which you can live with for years and which will "just work"
for you for a very long time to come.
So while we are expensive "per hour" we are *very* cheap when you conside the total cost of ownership of your solution.
When we deliver, you get satisfied! For YEARS to come!
If you've got a project you wish us to look into for you then send us an email
and explain with some few words what you would want us to do and we'll pick it up from there :)