With an average of 15 years of experience in software development, we realised the passion for building great products that make people smile is not as widespread as we thought. We started collaborating more than five years ago to build an engineering culture and help others making great things. Over the years, we developed ways of moving fast as a small team to remain competitive. Our motto is to find judo solutions, ones that deliver maximum efficiency with minimum effort.
We firmly believe software is meant to help human beings achieving their goals, and should never be seen as an impediment. To build software that people want to use, we put users are the centre of the picture to remember the main reason why we craft new products. We surely love technical challenges and the beauty of engineering, but never at the expense of the user experience.
The best software is the software that exists. Deixis’ engineering organisation uses an agile methodology to iterate and deliver continuously. This allows us to identify any issues early and make it easy to respond to change. It also allows fixing timescales and budget while playing with the scope of the product and its features. Deixis’ engineering team ensures that automated continuous delivery pipelines are set up at the beginning of every project, so we can start onboarding users with confidence as soon as we consider the product good enough, not after a lengthy “integration phase”.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. - Kelley
For every decision we make, we use a straightforward litmus test we call the crossroad dilemma. When the road splits, and we are not sure which one is better, we ask ourself what would be the cost to backtrack. When the answer is cheap, we stop lingering on the question and move on. When it is potentially expensive, we spend more time analysing the problem. When we analyse complex problems, we want to ensure decisions are fact-based, no faith-based. That is why we built tools to gather actionable data on our engineering products. Moreover, we strongly advise to do the same with business metrics, so we can come up with solutions that benefit users and not individual agendas.
Projects are chaotic and uncertain because precise requirements and perfect understanding of what a product should be like are wishful thinking. Frequently, companies have to dedicate a considerable amount of time hand-holding software engineers, which can lead to frustration and fatigue. To solve this significant point of friction, we carefully pick projects based on our interest in the domain and our dedication to solving the problem. When we care about other people’s need, we go the extra mile, and we develop autonomy in the project. The result benefits both our team and our customer. Our team is happy to spend time on the project, and our customers need fewer interactions with our team, so everyone saves time and energy.
An integral part of Deixis’ philosophy is sharing exciting discoveries. Our engineering team benefits every day from great open source products. From Google to freelancers, any developer has interesting learnings to share. That is why we also open-source non-business-critical software and encourage companies to do so. Open-source software is a force multiplier. That is one of our secret recipes to develop high-quality products quickly and at a fair price.