GearheadForHire for Small Business

GHFH For Small Business

GearheadForHire specializes in serving businesses with a hundred or fewer employees. Such companies are still small enough that it doesn’t make sense to have software developers on staff but large enough to have some specialist needs that may be hard to meet with simple off-the-shelf software packages. How can a small business afford custom software at an off-the-shelf price? The answer is through the GearheadForHire approach to software development that combines business experience with open source software and the latest in rapid development techniques.

The benefit of business experience: With twenty years business experience, GHFH can listen to your business requirements and translate those into technical requirements detailed enough to develop designs. New tools allow you to describe your needs in simple English and allow us to turn those ideas into code that can be tested. Link to more about behavior driven development

The benefit of open source: Using new open source operating systems and tools such as Linux and Ruby on Rails saves small businesses licensing fees freeing up funds for custom development. After all, one size fits no one! Small businesses wonder how open source can be supported, and are afraid they will end up on a dead end platform. The beauty of open source is that thousands of developers work with the tools and contribute to the community, so you can always find support. You also have more control over your own destiny since you aren’t obliged to pay for the application upgrade every time Microsoft comes out with a new release. GHFH can recommend the most appropriate open source tools to make sure you’re never stranded or caught by unexpected license fees. We also contribute back to the open source community by sharing code tools that we have developed. Link to see some of our shared code

The benefits of rapid development tools: Small business often need rapid development because they are trying to implement new ideas quickly to get ahead or are reacting to competitive pressures within the market place. How can you get results quickly without quality suffering? GHFH uses the latest techniques to get you what you need quickly and reliably. By breaking an idea into smaller pieces, we can implement the first phase and allow you to evaluate it before investing further. We can quickly prototype screens to give you an idea of what your application or website will look like, so you can provide feedback early on to make sure development time isn’t wasted. We also use a technique called behavior-driven development to reduce the amount of time spent testing features and still make sure that things work as expected. GHFH also develops using Virtual Machine (VM) technology making it easier to deploy applications, giving you flexibility in hosting environment and it makes the application and its development independent from the operating system. Using VMs for development and deployment of your interactive website brings many benefits including easier disaster recovery, easier scalability through new instantiations of the code, and reduced development costs. Finally, GHFH has developed our own libraries of commonly used capabilities that can be brought to bear to jumpstart any database driven website. Using tools like Ruby also makes your application easier to expand and maintain. You can read more about the GHFH platform and even see what some of the code looks like. more…