About us

What we do

We have over 30 years of software engineering experience, specialising in the following key areas:

• Design and development — we've built numerous software products over the years, both as an independant and a third party developer, in many different languages on many different platforms. We're software engineers, not programmers, so we're language (30+ at last count) and platform (micro to mainframe) independant. We've seen it all, and invented quite a few as well.
• Mentoring and process engineering — we've built engineering teams and processes from scratch, in Microsoft, Java and LAMP environments; we've mentored teams which need new inspiration; and we've fixed broken engineering teams. 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 common these days for small companies to depend upon software systems built by the owner's son, or a software engineering graduate friend of the family. We know how to help small companies strengthen their engineering practices within their capabilities, and how to mentor the owner's son so that quality is high enough to remain inhouse, instead of being outsourced. We bring engineering practices to non-engineers.

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 30 years, and we've seen most 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, was one of videoblogging's initial innovators, and is a long time notable Apple software developer and reverse engineering specialist. He wrote his first of many commercial software products in 1980 at age 14, after he'd taught himself assembly language; has written several programming languages and operating systems; and is a long time advocate of and specialist in human interface and experience design. He ran the first XP (Extreme Programming) project in Australia, and co-authored the multiple award winning Sytadel CMS, currently running the ACCC's Intranet and web sites, and AIHW's METeOR Metadata Repository amongst others. His personal blog can be found at www.kashum.com.