Highgroove Studios has taught me a lot about Software Development, Consulting, and building new web applications. Apart from the myriad of technical skills I’ve added since I came on board, Highgroove is a fantastic company to learn how to build your own web apps, how to design them, and how to remain focused on the most business critical aspects of the system. Highgroove taught me these things by adhering to a process which manages Agile development, responds to changing software requirements and business needs, and encourages constant communication. While these are all noticed by clients, there is one part of the Highgroove process that goes largely unseen; however, it is just as integral as the former three. That behind-the-scenes aspect of the Highgroove development process is keeping the software as simple as possible to meet current demands.

Keeping software systems simple is fundamental to the development style at Highgroove. What I’ve seen a lot of developers do (not the Highgroove developers of course!) is create an application that is too complex for the current applications scope, which wastes precious time in the process. The unfortunate side effect of creating apps that are too complex for what is actually needed is ultimately an app that performs poorly under load, is prone to errors, and is very difficult to change. All of those things affect a projects budget and could have been avoided. At Highgroove, we leverage the Open Source community and Ruby on Rails to build scalable web applications. This web application development framework comes with a core set of plugins but also enjoys a host of plugins and libraries all available for free. We don’t write custom loggers. We don’t write google apps or Facebook authentication from scratch. We hardly even have to write SQL. We leverage the network of freely available, well tested and trusted plugin library to accomplish these basic tasks for us. Once the common system functions are handled, that allows Highgroove to focus solely on business logic and building the app. That really means we get more done, in less time, and on budget too!

At Highgroove, we do not believe in creating Rube Goldberg machines…we just want to build the best possible app with the least amount of complexity that does exactly what you need. Its because of this ethos that Highgroove’s customers succeed (and I grow as a developer and a consultant too!).

How do you build apps?

Image Credit: Wikipedia