We Are All In This Together
The Heart of It All
It’s been a hard year in Dayton. In the past 12 months our community was hit by tornadoes and experienced a mass shooting. Dayton is a lot like other mid-sized midwestern towns. We’ve had our share of difficulties as the economy changed and we have a lot of really hard-working, resourceful, community-oriented people. While it seems like the hits keep coming, our city has come together to take care of each other.
Ohio has been recognized nationally in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our state leadership has implemented measures to “flatten the curve”. Simply put, we are being honest about our healthcare system’s inability to care for a huge number of sick people. This is really important, and it’s no secret that it’s also painful for small businesses, which employ people who aren’t able to continue earning a paycheck while their companies are closed, and our healthcare workers who are showing up to work without access to PPE.
At Tangram Flex, we have been operating fully remotely for the past two weeks. There are plenty of articles about best practices for working from home and how to communicate with your team so we’ve decided not to throw our 2 cents in there– it’s been well covered and we don’t have much to add other than “yep, what they said”. This is hard but it seems like the businesses that are able to keep things moving right now are doing their best. We’re grateful for the ability to stay open and continue taking care of our customers and our team.
There is something else happening right now that’s pretty amazing. All kinds of businesses are finding new ways to serve. Here in Dayton we have bars that are becoming bodegas, selling what they have to people in their neighborhoods who need it. One of our team’s personal favorite cafe/bakeries, St. Anne the Tart, set up ways to order ahead for carry out and they are hosting other independent businesses, too. Another Tangram Flex neighbor, Speakeasy Yoga (who inspired the name of this blog post), figured out how to transition to a live-stream model in about 12 hours. These are just a few close-to-home examples that we’ve found inspiring at Tangram.
A Moral Imperative
Tangram Flex is a company that works on some really hard problems in technology. We build tools to simplify and secure software integration for complex physical systems. We find this application of our work to be really impactful, but at the heart of it all is a moral imperative. Tangram Flex exists because technology grows faster than our ability to understand it, and that results in threats to human safety. Our core objective is to help make sure that the airplanes, cars, coffee makers, pacemakers, and so on will work correctly and keep us safe from harm.
How can we continue to take care of our team, business, and customers and also pitch in to help with COVID-19 efforts?
This sounds pretty idealistic but it’s the thread that runs through the culture at Tangram Flex. We started thinking about what we can do with the skills and resources we have to help soften hard edges in this pandemic. There are so many places to start. Companies like Flowfold in Maine have pivoted their whole business to manufacturing protective equipment for healthcare workers. Just a couple hours north of Dayton, Cleveland Whiskey is making hand sanitizer for the Cleveland Clinic. Another early-stage company in Dayton is distributing sanitizer to local first responders. Several companies operating out of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies are producing free resources- OhMD provides free, HIPAA-compliant video visits and text messaging between doctors and patients. The Boys and Girls Club here in Dayton is figuring out how to transition their programs to be available to the kids who would usually be at the club after school. It’s frankly quite humbling to see.
We have a big topic of conversation right now at Tangram Flex: how can we continue to take care of our team, business, and customers and also pitch in to help with COVID-19 efforts?
One Step at a Time
Right away we’ve found a simple project we can contribute to. We have a spare server that isn’t getting any use, so we set it up with software from Folding@Home to help run computer modeling and simulation of proteins. Folding@Home is a research project supported by researchers and labs at several universities. The project has been using their software infrastructure for distributed computing to research diseases for 20 years. Its essential idea is to create a super computer by crowdsourcing computer power. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Folding@Home is quickly setting up simulations to model the virus’ critical proteins in hopes of quickly identifying places where medicines can affect the virus. In a similar effort, Folding@Home was able to identify a new area of the Ebola virus that could be potentially attacked with medication. This was a huge finding– before that, Ebola was thought to be “undruggable”.
Using a spare server to run the Folding@Home software is a pretty small effort for our company, but we’ve seen the way each little bit of help or change can impact our community. We are brainstorming ideas right now… and we’re open to inspiration. Anyone can email us at hello@tangramflex.com with their stories and suggestions. We will continue to share projects that we participate in and anything new that we come up with. In the words of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, “All of us have the same goal: save lives, and do what we can now so that we can get out of this as quick as we can to get people back to work.”
Tangram Flex is a software company in Dayton, Ohio. Our team is a group of leaders from the DoD, private industry, and innovative startups committed to helping engineers build configurable systems for secure, rapid delivery of technology to the market. Have questions? Get in touch with our team.
Contributed by Liz Grauel, Technical Writer at Tangram Flex
