Welcome to the BigAtticHouse
424 South division
Chenoa,IL 61726
v. 815-945-7649
Founded in February 2000, BigAtticHouse focuses on building solutions based on the problems that plague your business.

Ann, Michael, Basil and Mia Johnson moved to the sleepy little town of Chenoa, IL in 1999. The house, a large victorian that has more-or-less been there for about 160 years, had the first walk-in attic seen by ever Basil (at the time age 3). Used to living in an apartment, he was amazed by the space and being able to play in his own back yard. During the fix-up phase, he asked "Can we go play at the big attic house?", and the name stuck. Even before they started the business, they would answer the phone "BigAtticHouse." You'll see the Big Attic House lurking behind the tulip tree in the photo at the right, taken by their neighbor Pearl Ball.

In February 2000, Ann and Michael decided that they'd had enough of the "corporate-monkey" lifestyle, and decided to carve their own future. The ups and downs of business ownership are nothing compared to a supportive spouse. The BigAtticHouse model is based on removing the pain from daily business, and providing the greatest long term value

Our Team:
  • Michael Johnson Senior developer, Michael has been coding since 1996. His focus has primarily been Internet technologies. Starting with building custom socket clients and servers, he's built systems in C, Delphi, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Active Server Pages (ASP), and PHP. Systems experience has ranged from various *Nix and linux systems to the range of Windows desktop and server machines.
  • Ann Johnson Customer Relations, Records and Bookkeeping, Ann also provides a practiced eye in user interface designs. Ann has also assisted in customer interviews where having a programmer performing the interview might affect the design.
  • Patrick Cola Sales and Marketing, Patrick has provided our on-site presence and sales process support for over 4 years. Patrick helps bridge the gap between your business domain needs and our technical expertise.
  • Nathan Wenger Junior developer, Nathan started with us on January 1st, 2006. Nathan's interest in web-based technologies has provided us with an energetic hand.
The BigAtticHouse Model:
  • "Find the Repetition" (Death by a thousand papercuts) Every user has some repetative task that they don't even realize they waste time doing each day. Re-keying data, print-and-type, and cut-and-paste form letters are all good examples where your business is bleeding to death by nickles and dimes. Frequently these are necessary processes that were acceptable losses when you have 10 customers, but overwhelming when you have 100.
  • "Find the Pain" Your users have to force themselves to adapt to your current software. We'll hear "dammit!" from our more vocal customers, or a resigned "It's ok, I'm used to it" from others. Here is where software can be created to ease your employee's workday, and allow them to feel like they can accomplish their jobs - instead of fighting the machines.
  • "Iterative development" Why spend six months building the wrong solution? We can get a simple piece of software to fix one single problem, and then build on it from there. In many cases, you can start seeing a difference in just a few weeks.
Since 2000, we've built projects that have gone on to:
  • Provide Stock, Re-order, and Special Order capability for an international network of 1000+ US military facilities.
  • Eliminated Thousands of hours of data-entry overtime, allowing two full-time people back into the warehouse fulfilling orders
  • Create a secure gateway to an internal application, granting the ability for an internal app to be securely accessed by users outside the firewall without modifying the original app, and preserving security.
  • Build a custom workflow engine, adaptable to your business and processes.
  • Build a Real-time Inventory System, capable of tracking shipping, backlog, backorders, and multiple warehouses. Customers can adjust their order appropriately, business users can watch stock trends as the system gives them suggested orders
  • Build a VectorSpace Database engine in C for linux AND windows platforms capable of finding similarity (or differences) in hundreds of thousands of documents per second.
  • A claim/evidence tracking system for a legal firm that assisted in closing over US$50 million in subrogation claims.
  • Exceeded Hi-speed Data Processing Requirements in C used to aggregate and process over 1000 requests per second activating hardware access related to account information. This was over 3 times the requested volume of 300 per second.

We hope we can serve you as well.