Building Digital Businesses

Does your idea, or need, solve a genuine problem for its intended users? We love digging into tough problems and inventing creative solutions. But if the problem isn’t there in the first place, no amount of fancy design and engineering is going to make your application useful or successful. Here’s what we believe.

• Architecture is more important than any given technology or programming language. “Architecture” refers to the way in which the components of your software are put together. Or, in tech speak, what set of trade-offs do we make? Do we prioritize performance, future expansion, maintainability, administrative control — or do we just let the developers go nuts and make everything ridiculously complex?
• Planning is hard work. It saves time. It saves money. Technical requirements, wireframes, user interaction diagrams, sequence diagrams, etc. allow us to make decisions at the last responsible moment. Every project consists of thousands of decisions, large and small. What code structure should we use? What library should we use for this popup? What database design should we use? We don’t hesitate to wait as long as possible when making the big decisions — as long as is responsible — holding out for as much information as possible. Sound reckless? It is. But it’s also led to some of the best decisions we’ve ever made, that have literally meant the difference between success and failure on major projects.
• Launch quickly. You may have heard of MVP (minimum viable product) before. It’s easy to say, it’s easy to understand, but it’s hard to actually do it. We will push you to launch as early as possible, though you likely will seek perfection. We believe it’s more important to start getting real-world feedback and test assumptions as early as possible, and then adjust as needed.
• Don’t over-engineer or over-complicate. Keep it simple. Think you can manage a bunch of crazy smart engineers yourself? Sure, go ahead and try. Let them create elaborate — unmaintainable — insanely complex, yet staggeringly beautiful code. Let them miss their deadlines by months and blow your budget out of the water. Let’s just see if that leads to a successful, maintainable, and scalable platform.
• Test like there is no tomorrow. We know how to create the right types of tests for different types of software, from unit tests to performance tests. Did we mention that there will be bugs —no matter what? Well, there will be. Don’t wait for your users to tell you the software is slow and buggy. You should know before they are bothered enough by it to tell you. And, by the time they contact you, you should already be working on the fix. We use tools to monitor applications at all levels to quickly diagnose and find bugs and improve performance.

We hope you take a few minutes to review our custom software development work below.