Client projects are our bread and butter. We develop custom solutions for our clients, pulling together Open Source components to build it faster and better.

Our primary development expertise is with the LAMP platform—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. We can create a custom web site to do just about anything with this platform. We also have experience with Windows, IIS, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Perl and Python. We can deploy Java and .NET applications, but these are outside our core specialties, so we usually outsource or refer these types of projects.

Over time we are building solutions, retaining the rights to release the code in other formats, and granting a liberal license to our clients so that they can reuse, modify, and redistrbute the code themselves.

Compared to other vendors, we offer two distinguishing advantages:

1. Complete documentation of your solution. We take the time to develop a specification ahead of time, and a set of programmers notes at the end. And in the middle, you get built-in documentation of your particular installation, including context help, usage tips and trick, and comments in the code.
2. You benefit from the code of our clients and partners around the world. Because we work primarily with open source, we can reuse modules developed for other clients to jump-start your project. After your project is over, we can add features developed for other clients back into your solution. This is one of the great benefits of open source--you pay for the features you need, when you need them, and get many additional features for free!

For most custom development, a discovery project is necessary. The discovery project can be covered by a service contract, done on an hourly basis, or with an hour or so discussion, we're usually comfortable quoting a fixed price for the discovery project.

The discovery project has one main deliverable: a functional specification of the project. We ignore technology, aside from known limitations, and focus on the use cases and scenarios for each end user. Our functional specification includes a list of requirements, a list of desired functionality, and a set of workflows for each identified scenario.

We then write a technical specification describing how we would propose to develop a solution to meet the functional specifications, and a proposal covering the options, schedule, and prices.

Projects done on a fixed price bid include a 1-year warranty, covering bugs, changes to client browser technology, and anything in the application that turns out to be not implemented according to the specification (including any change orders).

Projects may also be done as part of a larger service contract or straight hourly. In these cases, we still develop specifications but they don't have to be as rigorous, and change management becomes much simpler.

Contact us for more details or to start a discussion.