The studio, with the lid off.
Most software vendors will not tell you how they work until you have signed something. We are two people, so the honest version is short enough to publish, and publishing it saves everybody a call.
Devon Hewitt
Builds the software
Writes the code and the tested packages the math lives in. If your build has a bug at two in the afternoon in October, this is who is fixing it.
Jacob Skanes
Growth and partnerships
Usually your first call, and the one who walks the dock with you. Maps where the numbers go missing between the boat and the buyer.
That is the whole company. There is no account manager, and there is nobody between you and the person who wrote the thing.
- 01ScopeDaysA call, and where we can get to you, a walk around the dock or the floor. We are looking for where a number gets written down twice. You get a written summary of what we heard, including the parts we are not sure about, and a fixed price.
- 02DesignWeek oneA clickable version, in your words, using your species and your vessels. This is the cheapest week to change your mind and we would much rather you changed it here than in week five.
- 03BuildWeeks, not quartersYou see it working on your real workflow as it goes, not at the end. Anything that touches money goes into a tested package before it goes into a screen, because a spreadsheet error in a settlement is a person not being paid properly.
- 04LiveA day, on site where we canDevices set up, people shown, the first real week watched closely. We expect to change things in that week. A build that needs no changes on the floor was not being used.
- 05AfterOngoingThe monthly covers hosting, sync, support and engine updates. You email a person, not a queue. Seasons change and so does the software.
These are conventions written into the repository, and two of them are held by a check that fails the test suite: one compares every price on this site against the payment catalogue, and one counts the tests in each engine against the figures the homepage prints. The rest are discipline, which is a weaker thing and worth naming as such.
- Money that has to reconcile is integer cents
- A float divides and rounds, and that is how a settlement quietly ends up a cent off the pool. The two engines whose whole job is reconciling, crew share and costing, work in whole cents and allocate the remainder deliberately. The yield and payroll engines still hold money as rounded dollars, which is fine for what they report and is being converted; we would rather write that here than let you assume it.
- The math lives in a tested package
- Not in a screen, not in a database view. There are 5 of them so far carrying 169 tests between them, and every formula change ships with a test against a known good reference.
- Finalised records are read only
- A correction is a linked amendment that points back at the original. Nothing that somebody has already been told, paid, or signed can quietly become a different number later.
- Retrying is always safe
- Endpoints are idempotent and deletes are soft. A phone that sends the same landing twice because the connection dropped does not create two landings.
- Documents are generated on the server
- One rendering path, in version control, so the receipt from March and the receipt from October are the same document with different numbers.
- Your data leaves in a standard format whenever you ask
- Not as a favour, and not after a conversation about staying. Leaving us should take an afternoon.
The engines, and what they carry
@deepgrade/crew-share18 testsThe lay: gross stock down to a penny exact share per crew member.@deepgrade/grade-yield24 testsRecovery against target, grade mix, lot value, and margin over the shore price.@deepgrade/nl-payroll34 testsCRA federal and Newfoundland deductions, CPP and CPP2, EI, and vacation accrual.@deepgrade/costing23 testsLanded cost per pound, packaging cost per box, and cost rolled through a cut and mix.@deepgrade/labels70 testsThe two symbologies a pallet label has to carry: Code 128 for a laser scanner, QR for a phone.
- A compliance guarantee
- We can build the data spine that traceability and regulatory reporting sit on, as scoped work, and we will describe exactly what it does. We will not headline a regulatory promise that a two person studio has not shipped and could not stand behind in an audit. That sentence costs us work and it is staying on the page.
- Per seat pricing
- The monthly runs the hosting, the sync, support and the engine updates. It does not climb because you took on eight people for the crab season. Your headcount is not our revenue model.
- A build we cannot fit
- If what you need is a full ERP across six sites and forty concurrent users, say so on the call. We will tell you plainly that it is not us and point you at something better. We would rather lose the work than be the wrong answer to it.
- Work we have not started charging for
- We do not bill for the scoping call, and we do not run a paid discovery phase that produces a document instead of software.
What if the build is late?
You hear about it the week we know, not at the deadline. The price is fixed at scope, so a slip is our cost rather than a change order landing in your inbox. If we have got the scope badly wrong we will say so and we will talk about what comes out rather than quietly delivering less of everything.
What if we get a number wrong?
It is the thing we are most careful about and it is still possible. Anything that pays a person is reviewed by a human before it goes out, every engine ships with tests against worked examples, and where a constant is an estimate rather than a confirmed figure the package says so and so does the screen. If a settlement is wrong, we fix the engine, we add the test that would have caught it, and the correction is a linked record so the history stays honest.
What if you two get hit by a bus?
A fair question to ask a two person studio, and the honest answer is that this is the real risk of buying from us rather than from a company with two hundred staff. What we do about it: your data is in a standard database you can be given access to, the documents are generated from code rather than from a tool only we own, and the math is in packages that another developer can read. We would rather be replaceable than lock you in, because being hard to leave is not the same as being worth staying with.
Still reading?
Then you are probably the sort of operator we are built for. Twenty minutes, no obligation, and you leave with a plan and a number.