^home

What

#Background

This is a craftsmen's guild currently led by the hacker gwn.

Our expertise is product development be it web, mobile, desktop, serverless, IoT or blockchain apps.

Though we have experience in several domains such as e-commerce, online education, business intelligence and digital marketing; our focus has been finance technologies for the last couple of years.

We develop products as well as find & mentor bright people on their journey of becoming proper software experts.

We have been working with banks, exchanges, hedge funds and traders.

#Services

We have been building exchanges, trading bots, payment gateways, banking APIs, financial monitoring & reporting tools.

We have also been dabbling with crypto and have built cryptocurrencies, wallet apps, NFT marketplaces and DAOs.

That being said, we are not crypto bros. See our crypto criticism section for more.

Even though finance technologies are our focus, we are developing and consulting for other kinds of projects as well.

We offer product development, R&D, consultancy and education services.

#Manifesto

#Simplicity

Everybody in the business know that the typical software project suffer from missed deadlines, overspending, unreliability, frequent rewrites and more.

This is partly due to the fact that the industry has lost the art of simplicity. Especially the web industry. Nearly every web project is ridden with unnecessary accidental complexity these days. Memorized solutions developed by people who don't really understand the inner workings of the technologies & techniques they use. It's no wonder that the majority of software projects fail.

Hackers from the previous generation tried to warn us. Apparently it didn't help much. The quality of the average software is worse than ever.

Especially the web & Javascript world that we most spend time in is drowning in complexity & complications. Even the creator of Node.JS has once published a rant declaring that he "hates almost all software".

Is it possible to have a suckless development approach in this brave new web dominated world?

We believe so.

In this crazy world we made it our specialty to build simple systems with few moving parts that contain as little accidental complexity as possible. We find this to be a requirement for success in this ecosystem.

Read more details here.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#Cost-effectiveness

Technology is a means to an end.

A lot of people in the industry miss that. They romanticize certain tools and approaches. They want to architect big and fancy systems just to please themselves aesthetically / intellectually. They are easily sold on shiny popular solutions which deceitfully market themselves as being "best practices".

These people don't always completely realize the costs brought by the tools & approaches they choose to use!

As an example, these days it is not surprising to see a developer or a product manager proposing an infinitely scalable microservice architecture even for a B2B scenario that will involve around 100 active users at a time.

In such a case, the cost of designing & developing such a heavy system could never be justified. Yet this is common.

A good engineer doesn't over-engineer. They analyze the business requirements very carefully and design the simplest and the least costly solution possible. Potential benefits of the considered solutions should always be evaluated in relation to their costs. (Costs in terms of money, time, attention and other assets)

There are no free lunches.

Our goal is to always carefully analyze the requirements we receive and come up with solutions that are as cheap as possible without sacrificing feature completeness, reliability, and security.

We don't sell you what you don't need.

#Pragmatism & Product Mindset

We may be clinical nerds, but good thing is that we also happen to know how to ship products. We realize that technology is a means to an end. And we know what corners to cut when the situation demands.

Our challenge has always been to combine our ultra nerdy attitude with a pragmatic approach. Worse is better, boring technology, KISS, YAGNI, Pareto analysis, etc. That has always been a requirement for our survival in our heavily product and startup oriented journey.

#Transparency & No-bullshit

One of the other major problems in the industry is that the technological products can be too much of a black box for non-technical people.

There are of course some things only experts can understand.

But if there is too much mystery, how can the project owner be sure that they aren't being exploited? Or won't be in the future?

And even when these matters are discussed, it is easy for engineers to spit out technical mumbo-jumbo & overwhelm with jargon when confronted about for example the time and budget requirements of a product / feature.

This brings about the trust problem unless addressed properly.

The answer is in transparency, communication and documentation.

As the experts, we believe it is our job to make our clients & partners understand the technical specifications of projects, the trade-offs involved, and the architectural & implementation-related choices made, as much as possible, if they are interested.

We want you to understand, so that you can appreciate and trust us.

#Quality over Quantity

We are very selective when it comes to the projects we work on, people we work with, partnerships we establish and tools & ecosystems we build on top of. We stay away from scams and get-rich-quick schemes and try to focus on proper projects with a net positive impact on the society if possible, spearheaded by reputable people.

We don't and won't have a lot of clients & partners as we prefer to stay small. We focus on the quality of the work & the guild members, and don't outsource. Which combined cause our bandwidth to stay quite low. We unfortunately find ourselves regularly having to reject good people & projects. But this doesn't interfere with the fact that we always have time to meet with interesting people to discuss business opportunities.

#Crypto Criticism

We are not crypto bros. We might be doing crypto stuff from time to time but we don't evangelize nor oversell it. We know we are not saving the world.

Crypto is a huge experiment that we sometimes like to be a part of. Liberating finance from centralized authorities, playing games with smart people, building interesting stuff on top of interesting technology and discovering new markets & opportunities are things that motivate us. And maybe making a positive impact to the society, if we are lucky.

But unfortunately there is no denying that crypto is also a place where a load of scams, hacks, ponzi schemes, and a crazy amount of bullshit exist.

Anybody who wants to do something in crypto has to learn how to protect themselves. We have to listen to the critiques as well as the evangelists.

One of our goals is to help protect our partners & customers & the public from the dangers involved.

#Tech Stack & Philosophy

A project’s stack is always tailored according to its specific needs, but below are our default choices:

#Philosophy

Our tech stack curation heuristics:

               Boring
                 .
               x .
                 .
Mainstream . . . . . . . Eccentric
                 .
                 .
                 .
               Hyped

See boring technology if unfamiliar with the term.