We follow your lead to fulfill your business priorities.
Coders want to code. But code is not always the answer.
We are not shy about recommending low-code solutions and third-party integrations that save time and money.
Writing code is the most expensive thing that we do, and we avoid it whenever possible.
Case Study: Calligraphy.org
The original codebase for Calligraphy.org was 100% custom. The application was monolithic and included a full shopping cart/checkout experience, a content management system, marketing pages, custom image uploads and custom chat.
The only third-party integration was with Stripe for payment processing.
Third-party entegrations FTW
We redesigned Calligraphy.org from the ground up with a fraction of the original codebase.
The current iteration of Calligraphy.org is built on top of Shopify, GitHub and Firebase.
Shopify: Don't reinvent checkout
Shopping carts and checkout are a solved problem. We paid Shopify for their premium service and used Shopify's webhooks to call out to Firebase Cloud Functions. The Cloud Functions keep Calligraphy.org's Firestore DB in sync with Shopify, so the core Calligraphy.org application never has to reach out to Shopify to verify a transaction.
And the icing on the cake is Shopify's excellent admin system and third-party integrations. Calligraphy.org gets all of those benefits without any additional code to maintain.
GitHub: The ultimate content management
Wordpress is great, but GitHub is better.
We designed Calligraphy.org to pull all of its content from a GitHub repository. Like Shopify, GitHub provides webhooks that we pointed to Firebase Cloud Functions. The webhooks send content updates to Calligraphy.org's Firestore database where data can be served to the client application.
GitHub provides us with full git history and easy collaborative and editing tools without bloating the Calligraphy.org codebase.
Firebase: The glue
Calligraphy.org leverages all aspects of Firebase's web offering.
Firebase handles the database, serverless Cloud Functions for business logic, Firebase Hosting, Firebase Storage and Firebase Cloud Messaging.
We wrote Calligraphy.org's website, application-specific logic and the glue code to connect Firebase services to Shopify and GitHub.
1/3 the cost
The prior iteration of Calligraphy.org took a year to write. Our rewrite took four months.
And the codebase, while substantial, is significantly smaller and more maintainable.
To top it off, checkout bugs have gone to zero. We don't get strange edge cases where a user's address failed to validate because we didn't handle Cyrillic characters correctly. Thanks Shopify!
Business over development
We're not 10x developers. We're business owners who happen to write code sometimes.
We leverage all available resources and we NEVER suffer from "not invented here" syndrome. We build for the long term, because nobody likes to discover bugs in five-year old code. And we use test-driven development where appropriate to lock down business logic and critical functionality.