Consulting

Software delivery

Consulting engagements will likely involve delivering a specific product or piece of code alongside your in-house staff. Normally as short to medium term contacts, we'll work with your team, pair-program, up-skill your staff and advise to solve problems and deliver features.

Project inceptions

Have a new project in the pipeline? Not quite sure how you want to run it? Not entirely sure how you want to build? Need technical advice?

We're happy to work with you to do two week "project inception" engagements, helping you and your team discover what you should be building and how you're going to deliver it.

We'll run kick-off sessions, work with your technical staff to select and evaluate technology, and make sure that the rapid delivery and release of your new products is considered from the start - building continuous integration and delivery pipelines with you to help you deliver software in an iterative and agile way.

Modernising legacy code-bases

Got a hairy piece of .NET or JavaScript code that causes you problems on a day to day basis? Let us help.

We have years of experience wrangling legacy code and problematic systems back from the brink - we can help you fix your testing strategy, and teach you how to test drive and work effectively with legacy code.

Cultural change

We have experience helping technology companies grow their internal engineering capacity - helping your team leaders become leaders, helping you hire for cultural fit and technical suitability, and introducing the kind of rituals and routines that promote a strong engineering culture in your organisation.

We can come into your company and help you revise your hiring strategy, get your developers involved in user groups, open source, code dojos and shared learning, helping to focus your culture and promoting happy, more productive developers.

Workshops and training

We offer workshops in software development practices - equally as happy to follow a pre-prepared topic, or to work with you to produce something more specific to your business.

Just a few of the topics we can cover...
  • Agile software development
  • Introducing incremental delivery
  • Agile software development for "the business"
  • Story-writing, estimation and planning
  • Transitioning your team to DVCS - workflows, practices
  • Automated deployment on Windows
  • Continuous delivery and shipping fast
  • Refactoring and maturing legacy systems
  • Performance tuning and troubleshooting web applications
  • Achieving PCI compliance with minimal friction
  • Web-scale ASP.NET
  • Modularising your .NET codebase using package management
  • Software monitoring and self-instrumenting applications
  • Software and the third sector
  • Integrating with the JustGiving APIs
  • Hiring great teams
We've also given hour long lectures on a range of deep-dive topics including...
  • NuGet Packaging Practices
  • Writing great user stories and why it's important
  • Intro to NancyFx + SimpleServices
  • Lessons learnt operating a public API
  • Continuous delivery with Windows Azure
  • Introducing Snow - a static site generator for .NET
  • Writing great user stories and why it's important
  • Introducing System.Configuration.Abstractions
  • Lessons Learnt Authoring Libraries
  • Continuous delivery with Windows Azure + Azure Overview
  • The Assassination of OR/Ms by that coward relational storage
  • NHibernate done quick!
  • ASP.NET MVC extension points and tricks
  • Open source licensing
  • Writing technical stuff that people want to read
  • Performance profiling C# apps with dotTrace