CTG Engineering Blog

Simple Reinforcement Learning Applications in FedTech

Introduction Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful framework for optimizing complex operational workflows in federal technology environments—particularly where agencies must balance competing priorities, adapt to changing conditions, and operate under strict resource and policy constraints. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, RL enables an agent to learn effective decision strategies through

ai

Cypress Studio: E2E Testing with No-Code Test Generation

The landscape of end-to-end (E2E) testing has evolved dramatically over the past decade. While traditional frameworks like Selenium have served development teams for years, they've also introduced significant friction into the testing workflow. Complex WebDriver setups, flaky tests, and slow execution times have long been pain points that

Flipping the Switch: Using Feature Flags for Smarter Software Releases

Feature flags have become important tools for modern engineering teams, enabling safer deployments, controlled rollouts, and rapid experimentation. By decoupling code deployment from feature activation, teams can innovate faster while minimizing risks. We'll explore their benefits, implementation strategies, and critical lessons from real-world failures. Benefits of Feature Flags

"Manual" OCSP Certificate Validation Part 2: Java

In part 1 of this blog post we discussed how to do "manual" OCSP validation of digital certificates using OpenSSL and curl. In this post we're going to discus how to do the same thing in Java. Basic Setup To review, there were three steps to

ai

Overcoming Memory Limitations in Generative AI: Managing Context Windows Effectively

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Claude excel at generating human-like text, but they face a critical limitation: no inherent memory. Every interaction requires developers to supply relevant context within a fixed token capacity called a context window. While these windows have grown from 1K to over 1M tokens,

Easier CI/CD with GitHub Actions

Overview GitHub Actions is a native CI/CD solution within GitHub that enables teams to automate tasks within their software development lifecycle. Workflows can be triggered from GitHub events such as pushing to a branch or opening a pull request. It has quickly become the preferred CI/CD platform for

Getting to 99.999% Accuracy: Options for Narrow-Use LLM Tools

At DEFCON on August 11, Chief Digital and AI Officer for DoD Dr. Craig Martell spoke about large language models (LLMs) and their future use at the Department of Defense (DoD). In that talk he said the following about the need for accuracy: “I need five nines [99.999% accuracy]

MLOps in Government: What You Need Beyond Code to Get Your Model in Production

“This is great! Will it be ready by the quarterly review in two months?,” my customer asked. “It’s going to be ready by Tuesday,” I thought. But before saying anything, I took a pause. I knew my customer, an SES member with over 30 years of experience, must know

GPT Beat Our Coding Screens

GPT-4 successfully took the test we use as a technical screen for hiring software developers and data scientists. With almost no human judgment necessary, it was able to score 100% on the developer test and nearly that high on the data science one. I’m going to discuss what our

Inferring Hidden Data By Solving Linear Equations in Python

Last year, when I was looking at a publicly-released Excel file on school test scores that had been released by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) for the District of Columbia, I guessed that something was not working as intended. While much of the data was suppressed

Uncovering Raw Data From Percentages

When organizations release data but redact or suppress certain parts of it, like information pertaining to small subgroups, some information they reveal can let viewers infer the information that was hidden. One of the things that can give away what they were trying to keep secret is percentages. If you

Image and Text Contrast Detection

By Capital Technology Group's Fall 2022 Data Science intern, Akiva Neuman. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a list of recommendations for making web content more accessible for people with disabilities as well as for all users. The WCAG states that the contrast requirement for text visibility

"Manual" OCSP Certificate Validation Part 1: OpenSSL / Curl

In any organization that relies on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for authentication of users and/or devices, one of the key pillars in supporting that infrastructure is the validation of certificates. The story goes like this: Your organization has gone through the effort of either setting up a Certificate Authority

Digital Trust and Certificate Chains

One common challenge many software development teams encounter is verifying certificates and completing SSL handshakes. This issue manifests in multiple places: * Custom or COTS code fails to connect to external APIs * Dependency management fails to trust https repositories * External partners fail to connect to internally developed services without disabling certification

internship

Govpinions: Exploring Public Comments on Federal Regulations

Over eight short weeks, four of our talented interns—Aiden Nguyen, Hadas Hirt, Adam Janicki and Estee Brooks—developed a beta version of Govpinions to easily visualize and analyze patterns in public comments on government regulations. Understanding the Problem We'll start with a quick refresher on the U.

deep learning

Automating Organ Segmentation Using Deep Learning

This is the first in a series of two posts detailing the work our fabulous summer interns did in 2021. Want to join us for the summer of 2022? Apply to join us! This past summer two of our interns, David Wu and Chemda Wiener, developed a deep learning model

Becoming Great Software Developers

One thing we expect from our team is that with experience we should be improving our skills. We should learn new technologies and techniques and get better at the ones we already know. We should be curious about what else it out there and learn about them so that when

devops

Infrastructure as Code: An Introduction to Terraform & Pulumi

Advances in cloud technology and virtualization have introduced a new paradigm for managing infrastructure. The manual, tedious, and error-prone process of going to a cloud service provider (CSP) portal, selecting resources you want to create, and clicking through workflow steps has been replaced with a more repeatable and elegant solution:

data visualization

Exploring Health Data With Hospital Compare

The Hospital Compare project is an ongoing, collaborative effort between Capital Technology Group and Datawheel to rethink the dissemination of public data provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Appreciating the critically important and rich data that CMS publishes, we set out on a research and development

career development

Expectations and Responsibilities for Software Engineers at CTG

As CTG continues to grow, we are working carefully to ensure we maintain our culture and values as we scale. We also want to ensure our team has a clear understanding of our available career trajectories, and how we anticipate expectations and responsibilities to grow as our team members progress