Handshape

Handshape is a software development firm with a 10-year history of consistently successful delivery.

Our client base ranges from the largest international organizations to single-person startups.

Our ability to deliver comes from our strong focus on client engagement and feedback.

We distinguish ourselves by having a corporate philosophy built on our experience working with Internet applications since the early 1990's.

As the Internet has evolved, so have we. We remember Gopher and anon.penet.fi… but today we speak REST, AJAX, NoSQL, and Comet.

Our client base over just the last two years includes groups as large as the International Monetary Fund, the Department of National Defence, CATSA, PWGSC, and Natural Resources Canada. We're also just as happy to work with small firms looking to build out systems that will help them to grow into the future.

Client Engagement

We understand that our software solutions are expressions of your business solutions, and we actively involve our clients in the process of delivering these solutions.

Embrace Uncertainty

We know that part of the fundamental nature of requirements is that they change. Unlike the majority of software development shops, we don't fight this fact: we embrace it. As part of our continuous requirements elicitation process we seek out areas where business needs are uncertain. Where we can, we then code the necessary flexibility into our solution, and put the tools to react to change in the hands of our clients.

Standards over Vendors

When implementing solutions for clients, we know the pain that vendor lock-in can cause. To ease this, we target established (or emerging) Internet standards rather than the platforms of any particular vendor. Our experience has shown that in the long run, standards prevail long after vendors have moved on.

Convention over Configuration

Another practice that we have adopted is that of code-by-convention. Rather than forcing our clients (or their users) to explicitly declare the configuration of every possible variable, our applications offer sane defaults for all values, and allow users to override only those settings that need to change.

Eyes on the Prize

At Handshape, we know that the only real metric for successfully delivering software is the amount of software successfully delivered. Code points, bug triage, and QA coverage are means to an end, rather than a goal unto themselves.

Minimize administrative overhead

To maintain focus on actual software delivery, we strive to minimize duplicate communication and reporting. All of our business systems are as accessible to our clients as they are to our developers, so information about the state of your project is always at your fingertips.

The Handshape team is made up of a small group of developers, architects, and DBAs based out of the Ottawa area.

Because our skills base addresses standards, rather than vendors, our solutions are built equally well whether they are deployed against the newest J2EE spec, or the earliest CGI scripts. We can move as much or as little processing to your client as you like, or even build a custom client from scratch.

Algorithm design, reverse engineering, highly-usable UIs, or constrained technology spaces -- the sky is still the limit for your project.

If you'd like to engage us, or just discuss your needs, we'd be happy to hear from you.

(Our apologies for the poor penmanship, but it keeps the spam-bots away.)