Expertise ingenuity, with
experience

We are tenacious, creative, meticulous, and experienced; with a track-record that shows our successes. We can explain the details of the problem to you; give detailed and actionable advice; and often, we can deliver a solution.

For example, a client's database was taking 2 hours to load a ∼20 MB XML file (instead of seconds). We diagnosed and debugged, and located the actual fault, caused by a bad memory-reallocation algorithm in a C library.

We explained this with an exact analogy:

Consider a growing business of 50 people, which hires a 51^st, and can't fit their office. So they rent a new office with space for exactly 51 desks and move everyone over. Then they hire a 52^nd person, so move everyone to new premises with space for exactly 52. And so on. 

We have expertise in strategy consulting, digital marketing and M&A. We also have sufficient experience in SPIN and Challenger Sales, Operations, Finance, Accounting, Law, and HR to contextualise problems, ask pertinent questions, and recognise what we don't know.

This is about culture as much as brilliance. We can act as your secret weapon, or we can help you to build you own.

Our rigorous technical test is proven to identify exceptional candidates.

We understand just-in-time, solution-design, Lean, elimination of muda, and operational excellence, having learned from word-class experts. We can do supply-chain traceability: we know why blockchain doesn't help, and what actually does. We've been there during challenging go-lives.

Our team have product owners, project managers, scrum masters, and an agile coach, and we constantly iterate the solution-design as new requirements appear; this gives great flexibility, and better technical results. By integrating support with QA, we speed up the improvement-cycle.

Our toolkit of technologies includes: Linux; PostgreSQL; Python (inc. Django, SQLAlchemy, NumPy); PHP; Perl; Javascript (inc. React); HTML5 and CSS (inc. Bootstrap, PWA); Bash; C/C++. We've built data-driven warehousing systems, web-applications, mobile applications, tracking and process-flow tools, with a track-record of reliability, and security.

Specifics include: experimental design; mathematical modelling and error-analysis; energy-cycles; mechanics/dynamics; electromagnetism; optics and spectroscopy; silicon-nanowires; teaching.

As well as software and electronic engineering, we have practical mechanical-engineering skills: 3D printing, use of lathes and milling machines; CAD. We also discovered and helped set up a high-technology engineering joint venture.

For example, we've analysed multiple designs for renewable-energy; investigated a novel approach to titanium-refining; measured the luminous efficacy of zinc-sulfide; and even tested the cold-weather response of Brussels sprouts!

Our sysadmins are skilled at deployment, monitoring, cyber-security, and experts in networking, IPv6, high-performance-computing, high-availability, databases, and GNU/Linux. We can offer bespoke hosting, VM-hosting; a dedicated cluster, with monitoring and sysadmin support; or a turnkey system we can hand over.

Our business runs on OpenStack, Linux, PostgreSQL, Python, Apache, MediaWiki, NextCloud, Postfix, FreeIPA, Puppet, Icinga, Git, Zulip, RT, NumPy, Firefox, Android, …, all of which we can share as a "business in a box".

We apply data science to business, with improved forecasting, simulation of alternatives, and optimisation of strategy, resulting in substantial savings. Key technologies include Python, NumPy and SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, R, Tensorflow and Superset, and Machine Learning.

Traditional statistics (hypothesis testing, mean/variance, distinguishing random variation from systematic errors, error-bars, …) remains important, even in the machine-learning era.

We understand how to embed GPT in products; how the emergent behaviour scales with parameter-count; the limitations of the transformer-architecture, how to write a good prompt; and how to train a local LLM on a specific, private data-set, and perform RAG (retrieval augmented generation) using a vector database and embeddings. We are also acutely aware of the ethical and privacy issues. This is a rapidly-changing technology, and we are continuously adapting.

This can be extremely cost-efficient to explore: solutions typically provide immediate savings from the moment of implementation. We have also worked on industrial robots, and AMR (autonomous mobile robots for goods-to-person).

We commonly use the ESP-32, Arduino, and Raspberry-Pi devices; often with Node-Red, LoRa or 5G for data. We used Bluetooth Low-Energy (BTLE) for approximate ranging, and Ultra-Wide-Band RF for precision positioning.

We can design PCBs, manufacture them at small scale, and write firmware, and computer-interfaces for microcontrollers, such as the Arduino and the ESP-32.

Climate-change is the great crisis of our time. It demands urgent action — which must technically correct, with practical solutions that will work at scale: we can distinguish the green from the greenwash.

A detailed knowledge, combined with careful observation of user behaviour, and testing of alternatives helps to make the best possible experience. Furthermore poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) is essential.

We can do live/remote streaming, recordings, sound-mixing and PA, and audio/video/image editing. This pipeline can be automated with tools such as ffmpeg. Furthermore, we can analyse and align audio using spectrograms, and perform physics and process-analysis using motion-capture.

For example, quantum computers (when they become practical — in some years time) could easily defeat RSA encryption. This is an area of active interest and constantly learning for us, so that we can be in the vanguard when the technology becomes available.

* Unlike the other specialisms on this page, we don't claim expertise in this topic; merely a well-informed watching brief.

Teaching includes: undergraduate physics at Cambridge; courses written and taught in electronics and programming; agile coaching; learn-to-code; flying instruction.

The greatest phrase in science is not "Eureka", but "Hmm, that's odd". An engineer is someone who would "unscrew the inscrutable". Finding out something you don't know is a source of continuous delight.

Similarly, photography helped investigate the inaccessible heart of a complex, fast-moving machine; history of science trains the imagination in the art of the possible; theatre requires creativity, marketing, and design; orchestral music needs precision, teamwork, organisation and leadership; piano playing requires the practical mathematics of harmony; model aircraft prototyping skills transfer to drones, robotics, and test-jigs; cookery is practical chemistry; and sports are an excellent source of analogies.