About

What we do

We’re software engineers and we build stuff, for our customers, clients, ourselves, and the open source community. We work with various languages and platforms, and believe that language and environments are simply tools on top of a solid understanding of engineering practices, not the other way around.

Our background

We have over 40 years of software engineering experience, specialising in the following key areas:

• Design and development — We’ve built numerous software products over the years, commercial and open source, internally as products and as custom work for clients. We’ve worked in many different languages (30+ at last count) and on many different platforms, with our current focus being LAMP, OS X and iOS and on web platforms such as Drupal, Symfony, Laravel and Cake. We’ve seen it all, and invented some as well.
• Mentoring and process engineering — We’ve built engineering teams and processes from scratch, in Microsoft, Java and LAMP environments; in various development methodology environments including SDLC, Agile and Lean; we’ve mentored teams which need new inspiration; and fixed teams that are broken. Whether it be processes, quality control, or the people and their group mind, we know what breaks, and we know how to fix it.
• Software for non-engineers — It’s still common for small businesses to depend upon software systems built by a friend or family member who dabbles with coding. We know how to help businesses strengthen their engineering practices within their capabilities, improving quality and confidence in the software.

This sounds like we’re good at everything. We’re not, but we’d be wasting a lot of your time if we told everything we are good at. There’s been a lot of good and dumb engineering over the last 40 years, and we’ve seen a lot of it.

Processes

We’re small, with extensive experience in both in traditional SDLC, Agile and Lean methodologies, and we work with you closely on your outcomes and desires.

Philosophy

Our philosophy is to create beautiful products by incorporating good technical and user experience design; and to create productive and passionate engineering teams, drawing upon modern advances in team building and the software engineering mindset.

People

Our principle, Richard Bennett, has a long history of software engineering and developed his first of many commercial software products in 1980 at age 14 using assembly language. He was one of videoblogging’s initial innovators, is a long time notable Apple software developer; has received an Apple II community lifetime achievement award; has written several programming languages and operating systems; has a strong reverse engineering background; and is a long time advocate of and specialist in human interface and experience design. He ran the first ever Agile XP (Extreme Programming) project in Australia, and co-authored the Sytadel enterprise CMS, which has won numerous awards including an Australian Government innovation award for AIHW’s METeOR Metadata Repository.