About Us

Recently I wrote an email to our logo designer which explained allot about copypastel, Ecin, and myself. I hope to one day have an about page, and if there is one at the time of your reading then, “YES!” For now, I thought I would toss up a post to take place of the about page until we get our act in gear. I was informed my email was actually pretty intriguing so here you go!

So the history of copypastel really comes from Ecin finding it misspelled on a site. He just happened to check the domain name and it was available. We both thought it was an awesome name because in coding, copy-pasting is really bad (within the same project), but done allot. The L made it sound more elegant to say, even though it doesn’t have the same meaning. It was sort of a joke about re-phrasing a bad practice with a new word doesn’t make it seem so bad. For a while we had a tag line re-usable is the new black, which I am sure is cliche.

For a while we referred to ourselves as CP+L but now it’s just cpl. Nothing against the + just cpl was easier to type!

Ecin’s take on the name is: copypastel – no intricate meaning. However, we could push that all great ideas are built on top of giants, as Newton said. Some would call this “copying and pasting”. But I guess we add an “l” to the process?

We’re an “idea factory”, a “curiosity satisfier”. In fact, consider that most customers wouldn’t be well versed in programming/coding anyway. The ultimate goal of cpl is to build products and services which require little on-going maintenance and generate little income streams. Micropreneuring! I actually deal more in the physical domain, not just software, as I am an electronics engineer. We have looked at making some products which use ponoko which is sort of a just in time materials system for physical devices. With something like ponoko we would send the parts directly to the customer and have them assemble it. If someone was interested in taking a product to more mass production lines we would license out the design. For products people wish us to design, one pricing model we have is you pay us at a minimum hourly rate, but then we own a small percentage of the product by having a fixed percentage we take off of any profits. The customer has the opportunity to buy the license outright from us after they can afford it.

I would say that it is more the design philosophy which makes us unique. Unlike other software shops where you have to have a detailed specification, you can talk with us about an idea and we are very good at coming up with a user experience, and a viable implementation which meets the spirit of your idea. We could build something off of an idea like, “I want a system which makes it easier to send snail mail” as opposed to “here is how I envision a product working”. Coding is just a tool for us.

About ourselves, Ecin is extremely experimental and creative. He will gladly use new unproven technology and comes up with new ideas using new technologies often. His posts are really what bring readers to CPL, he is the interesting one!

I am much more design based. I prefer to have a solid end product vision with a viable market. My projects tend to be long and often, not nearly as interesting. But I can work on bigger projects with out getting bored. I am creative in the solution and implementation, but I pull from a base of existing proven technologies, as opposed to writing or using experimental code.

Ecin and I met at school. We were part of a philosophy/technology class in which the culminating project was a robotics competition. Both of us had actually not had the opportunity to program before college, and were both in the first course of computer science; though we did not know it until after. Ecin would stand at the whiteboard with me for hours arguing algorithms and our limited knowledge of the C language. I remember we had a bug, and the system would report Runtime Error #3. I concluded it was because the array was too big, didn’t check a single document; the thought didn’t even occur to me. I tried to explain what was happening and wrote tons of work arounds. Ecin quietly discovered the documentation online and fixed the array out of bounds error.

We would spend whole nights together taking shifts coding and sleeping under the desk so we could make it through classes the next day. We deemed the room the timeless room, a windowless dungeon filled with whiteboards. My type of work environment. This story is getting a little nostalgic for me as I write it, but I thought it important to share how committed and capable we can be with limited resources. We will find the answer, do the research, and do it the right way. We worked on many projects throughout school as well as after, and luckily have some experience to go with our enthusiasm. I would not worry about myself not reading the docs next time! Needless to say we did put allot of work into our freshman robotics project, but together in a pool of teams which didn’t just have green shoed freshman programmers, we created a robot which could solve the maze for the first time in two years.

So that’s just a little bit about copypastel. Soon we will put up about pages which have our technical qualifications. Needless to say we are both very good at what we do. I find myself fortunate to have found a partner equally as skilled and interested, but with a different philosophy and ideas. Together we can take ideas and create truly amazing solutions, regardless of domain.