Custom Programming & Software Development
Small, sharp software: internal tools, automation, integrations, and fixes for the code you already depend on.
At a glance
- Internal tools that fit your workflow
- Automation for repetitive work
- Integrations between the systems you use
- Legacy code fixed, not lectured about
- Built plainly, documented, yours
Software that fits the work
Off-the-shelf software makes you work its way. We build the other kind: a quoting tool that matches how you actually quote, a script that kills a weekly copy-paste ritual, an integration that makes two systems finally talk. Mostly PHP and MySQL, APIs where needed, boring, dependable technology that keeps running.
The technology choice is deliberate and it is unfashionable. A small business tool has to still run in eight years, on a host that has changed twice, after the person who commissioned it has left. That rules out a lot of what is currently interesting. PHP and MySQL are dull, ubiquitous, and still going to be installed on whatever you move to, which is precisely the point.
The same thinking governs how much gets built. Every feature is something that can break later and something somebody has to understand later, so the useful question is rarely what else it could do. It is what the smallest thing is that removes the problem you actually have.
Describe the job you keep doing by hand Small projects welcome.
Work a computer should already be doing
Almost every project starts as somebody describing their Tuesday. If any of these is yours, there is probably a short piece of software in it.
- Somebody exports a report, opens it in a spreadsheet, and retypes it into another system.
- The same invoice information gets entered twice because two programs do not speak.
- A weekly summary takes an afternoon and is out of date by Thursday.
- Quotes are built by copying last month’s file and editing the parts that changed.
- The tool that runs a core part of the business was written by somebody who left.
- You pay per seat for software and use one screen of it.
- A spreadsheet has become a database, and four people have their own copy.
- Something breaks on the first of the month and nobody knows why.
What you get.
Internal web tools & dashboards
One screen that shows the thing your team keeps asking for, instead of four exports and a spreadsheet.
Task automation & scheduled scripts
The weekly ritual, gone. These are usually the cheapest projects and the ones people notice most.
System integrations & APIs
Two systems that finally talk, so the same information stops being typed into both of them by hand.
Database design & cleanup
MySQL, structured so that next year’s question can be answered without another export and another spreadsheet.
Legacy code repair & modernization
Diagnosed first, quoted second. A rewrite is sometimes right and it is rarely the cheapest thing that works.
Reports that generate themselves
In your inbox on schedule, in the format the person reading it wants, without anybody remembering to make it.
How a build runs
Small pieces, delivered working, with you seeing it early enough to change your mind cheaply.
We watch you do the job
The current process, including the awkward parts people leave out of the description. That hour saves several later.
You get a scope and a fixed price
What it will do, what it will not do, and what it costs. The things it will not do are written down on purpose.
It gets built in visible pieces
You see something working early and often. Changing your mind in week one is cheap and entirely expected.
It ships with the keys and the notes
Source, documentation and credentials handed over, and somebody on your side shown how it hangs together.
Built in Kitchener, useful anywhere
This is one of the two services where the client does not have to be nearby. The work is done from Kitchener, and plenty of it is for businesses in Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph and the townships, but a scheduled script does not care where the person who asked for it sits.
Being local still changes the early part. The most valuable hour of a small software project is the one spent standing behind somebody while they do the job by hand, because the description of a process and the process are never quite the same thing. Where that hour can happen in person, the resulting tool is markedly better. Where it cannot, a screen share does most of the same work.
The other local advantage is unglamorous: when something built here needs a change in three years, the person who wrote it is still in the same region and still answers the phone.
On-site across
- Kitchener
- Waterloo
- Cambridge
- Guelph
- Elmira
- St. Jacobs
- New Hamburg
- Baden
- Breslau
- Ayr
- Wellesley
Web design, hosting and programming clients don’t need to be local.
Small projects welcome
Plenty of shops won’t touch a two-day script. We will, small automations often return more than big rebuilds. Many projects start from a consulting plan and ship with training so the team actually adopts the tool. Web-facing work lives under web design.
A two day script that removes an hour a week pays for itself inside a quarter and keeps paying every year after. Nobody writes a case study about it, which is roughly why so few firms will quote for one. It remains the best value in this entire list of services.
You own what gets built. Source, documentation and credentials are handed over on delivery, and nothing is written in a way that requires us specifically to maintain it. If you want another developer to take it on later, the handover is a folder rather than a negotiation.
More of what we do
Describe your Tuesday.
The job somebody does by hand every week is usually a short piece of software. You get a scope, a fixed price, and a written list of what it deliberately will not do.