Why we focus on the fundamentals of software engineering and code quality

On our website, we aim to inspire and educate future software engineers, business owners and technology executives on the fundamentals of Building Better Software. We focus on modern cloud-native backend software - the kind that powers commerce and operations at all major businesses today, in all industries, across the world.

Many domain experts, such as data scientists, researchers, traders, finance and accounting professionals, have in recent years gravitated towards the Python programming language as the easiest and most pragmatic entry point into coding. Within just a few weeks of learning the language, they become empowered to put their models and ideas into practice, to create data-crunching tools, to build proof-of-concept solutions and demonstrate their research in a tangible, almost business-ready form.

The keyword here is "almost".

We have worked with many such experts in a variety of industries to help take their code to the next level. We start with what they've built and turn it into clean, reliable, maintainable, production-ready code which can be deployed and scaled with the needs of their organisation. Code that can serve as the basis of large-scale solutions providing long-term competitive advantage to the business.

It's typically an 80 / 20 kind of situation. The first 80% of the work requires one kind of effort (putting expertise into code - something best done by the domain-experts), whereas the final 20% requires a very different kind of effort (productionising the code - something only an experienced software engineer can do).

Gloss over that last 20% and you have a very expensive, very valuable, very fragile project which just isn't going to perform once the rubber hits the road. So many great ideas end there. It's even more unfortunate when it turns out there is market traction as well - clients and stakeholders end up being disappointed as the project fails to scale to meet demands, promises and expectations.

To help with this, we have decided to publish some of the materials behind our intensive training programmes which re-introduce modern Python coding from a software engineering perspective. The hands-on approach is specifically designed for teams and individual domain experts with limited working proficiency of the language and drills down a handful of core principles which quickly improve the quality of their code.

We tailor our programmes to the specific needs and skill levels of our clients and work closely with them to achieve tangible, lasting results. On our website you will find decades of experience and insights, crammed into a series of highly focused, high-leverage lessons. You are encouraged to undertake the training yourself, share it with your team, or reach out to us for a tailored on-premises or remote training experience for your team.