[devloop]

About

A small practice, deliberately

Devloop is an independent software development practice based in Ottawa. We work with finance, operations and administration teams at organisations between roughly fifty and a thousand people, where the systems are mostly bought rather than built and the gaps between them get filled by hand.

What we are good at

Legacy interfaces

Getting data out of old systems

Fixed width files, scheduled SFTP drops, ODBC against a database somebody has been told not to touch, screen scrapes of last resort. This is most of the actual work on most projects.

Data modelling

Deciding what the record actually is

Two systems will disagree about what counts as a customer, a transaction, or a period. Resolving that in writing before anyone codes is usually what makes a project succeed or fail.

Operations

Making the thing run every night

Scheduling, retries, alerting, and a log someone can read at eight in the morning to see what happened. A pipeline nobody trusts gets replaced by a spreadsheet within a quarter.

How we are set up

The practice runs lean on purpose. Engagements are staffed by one or two developers who stay on the project from the first conversation to handover, with specialists brought in by the week when something calls for it.

We keep a standing preference for boring technology. Postgres rather than something newer, plain scheduled jobs rather than a distributed workflow engine, server rendered pages rather than a framework that needs a build step your team will not maintain. The test we apply is whether a competent developer who has never met us can pick the codebase up in a week.

Work is delivered into your infrastructure and your source control. We do not host your data as a condition of the engagement, and we do not charge a licence fee for software you paid us to write.

Details

Founded
2019
Location
Ottawa, Ontario. Remote across Canada.
Typical engagement
Six to sixteen weeks, fixed scope
Common stack
Python, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, Linux, Docker
Sectors
Distribution, professional services, not for profit, municipal

What we do not do

Staff augmentation

We take responsibility for delivering a defined piece of work. We do not place developers into your team by the month to be directed by someone else.

Full system replacement

Replacing an ERP or a case management system is a programme, not a project, and it needs a different kind of firm. We build the pieces around one.