L o g i c : M a c h i n e
Software Development Studio
Low-Level Unix Training   |   Core Development Skills Training   |   Developer Mentoring   |   Software Consultancy
With 35 years worth of solid development experience behind us, across a multitude of companies, projects and business domains (both commercial and government), we specialise in training and mentoring developers to apply solid software development best-practices and technical craftsmanship to deliver high-quality software.
When it comes to the technical side of software development, most people tend to focus on the specific details and syntatic-sugar of 'this' language or 'that' framework. But whilst the 'how' is important, we feel the 'what' and 'why' are vastly overlooked aspects.
Our focus is on engendering craftsmanship, becoming a master of your tools and focusing specifically on the underlying principles and fundamental building blocks.
We are keen to share the breadth and depth of our experience and know-how with the wider development community through training, mentoring and consultancy.
The one improvement which will significantly advance your development process, is automation.
No other single activity will generate such a huge return on investment.
However based on decades of face-to-face developer interaction, we find scant evidence of wide-spread low-level knowledge, with developers typically just 'getting by'.
From our experience, developers are keen to learn more and are quick to apply new understanding to real-world problems.
With a solid grounding in the fundamentals of the Operating System, your developers will be well equiped to automate the key pain-points experienced within your development process.
Streamlining and standardising your processes through automation will repay great dividends and lift your developers up from the drudgery of routine tasks, freeing and enabling them to focus on higher value-add activities.
With 35 years-worth of *nix knowledge, we offer training for candidates with various levels of experience.
We deliver a solid grounding in the fundamentals of the GNU/Linux Operating System, with a particular focus on the underlying design principles. Also covering the introduction of automation into the development process as well as developer tweaks and productivity enhancements.
Other training providers tend to focus more on a selection of common commands.
However we feel this offers superficial education without any actual understanding.
Our key focus is on demystifying the Operating System; deep-diving into the fundamental concepts and principles, showing first-hand how things work and how the various components fit together.
This provides understanding, giving a solid base for ongoing personal learning.
Developing Low-Level Unix Skills
Developing High Quality Software
Whilst every developer will have their own notion regarding code quality, consistently applying solid software development best practices is the first step.
We prefer using coding techniques and code structures which are proven to promote clean linear code, whose purpose and intent is obvious and which is trivial to test, therefore greatly reducing development and testing effort.
Code design and structure are often left as a whim to the developer, but applying a small number of simple techniques can ensure all code is high-quality, highly configurable and easily extendable.
Readability is the primary factory.
Always strive for simplicity over 'clever' code.
Clean, well thought out code prevents entire classes of errors from creeping in.
However, it takes a surprising amount of effort to create 'simple' code.
The differentiator here is craftsmanship; an often overlooked endeavour.
We offer training based on 35 years of development experience.
Every application consists of some business logic, infrastructure code and perhaps some configurable properties. Additionally, many applications maintain connections to external or third-party systems.
Typically, the infrastructure code can take up to 80%-90% of the overall project, with the actual business logic taking up the remaining 10%-20%.
For each application, all of this code is usually recreated from scratch.
But the only reason the project exists is to get that small amount of business logic into production.
It is therefore a bitter realisation that most of the project time, effort and cost will be spent building the infrastructure logic; something of no direct benefit to the company.
Further, most of the ongoing support and maintenance costs will be similarly consumed.
It is surprising though how much similarity exists across projects.
Therefore significant duplication is evident, with developers often being tasked with simply 're-inventing the wheel'.
Hence creating software with deliberate reuse in mind would seem prudent; removing duplication of effort.
So too, actively improving the overall design and code structure to minimise issues and enhance readability, testability and quality.
Applying solid software development best-practices and technical craftsmanship in a specific manner can deliver software which is both high-quality and amenable to reuse.
In practice, it is possible to craft every part of an application for potential future reuse.
Specifically, both the infrastructure code and business logic can be made reusable.
Reusable software must, by its very nature, be highly configurable. However, most of this configuration can also be reused.
Our company strap-line is "Faster, Cheaper and Higher Quality". However the only really important term there is "Quality", as it matters little if you are faster or cheaper if the end result either does not actually work, or does not work reliably.
A great deal of thought goes into developing a component which is both high-quality and amenable to reuse.
Fundamentally though, only reliable, rock-solid components are good enough.
Our approach therefore mandates a strict focus on code quality.
We prefer using coding techniques and code structures which are proven to promote clean linear code, whose purpose and intent is obvious, therefore greatly enhancing both readability and testability.
Time saved during development can be reinvested in creating comprehensive test suites, offering additional confidence in the underlying implementation.
Such test suites are, of course, also reusable; meaning a one-off investment. They can however be incrementally improved.
Reusing tried-and-tested, off-the-shelf components results in significantly improved quality and reliability, thereby greatly reducing production bugs and minimising ongoing support costs.
Reuse implicitly delivers standardisation across applications, further reducing both support and DevOps costs.
Our training courses delve into the technicalities of creating high quality software which is amenable to reuse.
Reusable components are designed from the ground up to be high-quality, highly configurable and easily extendable.
Through wide-spread reuse, the costs associated with development, support and maintenance are effectively distributed across all entities sharing the reusable components, meaning savings to individual budgets.
Even within non-reuse scenarios, high-quality, readable, testable, easily maintainable code significantly reduces upfront development and testing costs, as well as on-going maintenance costs.
Developing Reusable Software
Our simple formula:
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Minimal bureaucracy
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Truly empowered teams
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High-quality software techniques
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Process automation
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Immutable environments
Software development is a creative process which flourishes when the highly skilled participants have autonomy.
If you trust and respect your development teams, they will respond in kind and will deliver a top-notch result.
Truly empowered, autonomous teams are fundamental to delivering high quality software.
Within the world of software development, the vast majority of technical problems have already been solved - countless times over.
Creating clean, well-structured, highly readable software which is amenable to reuse therefore removes gross duplication of effort whilst simultaneously increasing the quality of the resultant code-base and minimising both up-front and on-going costs.
Process automation should also take high priority. However within most organisations, this is rarely the case.
At a bare minimum, it should be possible to:
  • check-out all of the source code for any given project by issuing a single command
  • fully / incrementally build the project by issuing a single command
  • issue a single command to setup and initialise a fully-runnable environment
  • issue a single command to deploy a given build to a specific environment
Many organisations have failed to automate even this basic set of functionality.
No manual steps should be required to setup an environment.
Once a single manual intervention is permitted within any environment, that environment immediately becomes compromised.
Nobody will remember what change was made, where it was made, nor why it was made. It therefore becomes impossible to have any confidence in the environment due to unrepeatable modifications.
Wide-scale process automation is therefore a no-brainer.
Our approach recommends maintaining minimal bureaucracy and ensuring your development teams are truly empowered and autonomous.
All development effort should be directed towards creating high-quality software and implementing wide-scale process automation.
Finally, creating immutable environments will prevent a world of pain.
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We can help if you:
  • realise that traditional multi-year projects no longer align with your customer needs and expectations
  • need to improve your time-to-market
  • aspire to stay at the forefront of your business domain
  • understand the consequences if even one of your competitors can execute or pivot faster than you
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Alas, we cannot help if you:
  • are confident that your current approach to software development satisfies your medium-to-long-term business needs
  • have not noticed that all service companies have become technology companies
  • are blinkered to the changes transforming software development
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