Two worlds, and the overlap is the interesting part.

Sector

Universities & research

We have worked with universities on two very different kinds of problem, and we are equally at home in both.

Archives and humanities projects

Digital archives, collections and other humanities websites — the kind of project where the material is irregular, the metadata matters, and the thing has to still be there and still be citable in fifteen years. This is where generic content management systems tend to fall down hardest: the collection gets flattened to fit the software instead of the software being shaped around the collection.

We model the structure to the material, keep URLs stable and citable, and make sure the collection can be found — by search engines, by answer engines, and by the researcher who has only a half-remembered fragment to go on.

Scientific and research computing

At the other end of the building, we have built a Slurm-based parallel processing cluster for a university research group: many machines scheduling scientific workloads, with the storage, queueing and user management that has to sit around them, and the ongoing maintenance to keep it running.

Sector

Small & mid-sized businesses

Organisations large enough to depend seriously on their systems, but not large enough to keep a full technology department on staff. In practice we become that department — on call, but not on payroll.

The work is a mixture: a website that has fallen behind, a back-office process still living in a spreadsheet that four people email around, a server nobody has patched since the person who set it up left, a site that used to bring in enquiries and quietly stopped.

• Websites rebuilt off legacy platforms, and kept current afterwards
• Search and answer-engine work, so people can find you
• Internal tools that replace the spreadsheet-by-email process
• Servers, hosting and email that someone is actually responsible for

How it goes

Relationships, not projects

Nearly all of our work has come by word of mouth, and most of our clients have been with us for years. That shapes how we build: something clever that only we can maintain is not clever, it is a liability we would be handing to ourselves.

It also means we are candid about scope. If a piece of work is not something we should take on, or you would be better served by someone else, we will say so early — which is usually why the next referral arrives.