The biggest decision companies wrestle with before commencing a project to build a software product is whether they should hire an outside firm or attempt to build an in-house team.
We have a two-part answer to that question:
- We consider our offering to be the perfect middle-ground option in that we're an outside firm available to act as an in-house team.
- The way we partner with our clients brings about all the benefits (and more) of an in-house team with none of the risks. Consider the following:
- We have an established process.
- We have an established technology stack.
- We have an established team (roles, culture, chemistry).
- You'll never have to worry about turnover.
- Our teams are led by a professional CTO.
Beyond this, our partnerships offer several unique advantages over other firms.
Our Partnership Is Principled
Caxiam was founded on the idea of principled engineering. This means that every task, by every engineer, on every team runs through our principled engineering process, aimed at creating the highest quality software available.
Before features are released to the world, code is reviewed by multiple engineers, run through a battery of acceptance tests, reviewed by third-party analysis (Code Climate), committed to a historical repository (Github), and then deployed to the AWS ecosystem.
With each deploy, the entire server is rebuilt from scratch, automatically, and all acceptance tests are run again to ensure the brand-new server is compatible with everything about to deploy. This can happen on a single server or a geographically distributed fleet of servers.
Codebases are decentralized between front-end (Ember.js) and back-end (APIs written in Python), while servers are decentralized between database (RDS), web (EC2), and media (S3 and CloudFront) and then centrally orchestrated via CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk.
Our Partnership Is Elastic
We understand that different seasons call for different needs. Partnership with Caxiam is elastic, meaning you can scale up or throttle down based on your business cycles. This is difficult to do with an in-house team without hurting corporate culture due to layoffs.
We offer both full-throttle and fractional-throttle partnerships. Engineering with Caxiam is always team-based, so we'll never assign your project to a single engineer looking for something to do.
Each team includes an experienced CTO who will serve as your primary point of contact to lead, oversee, architect, design, and inspect the work done by our engineering staff.
Our Partnership Is All-in
When you partner with Caxiam, you partner with all of us. We accept 2-3 new projects per year and never have more than 8-12 clients that we're serving on an annual basis. This is by design, because as owners we enjoy building software far more than we enjoy running a software company.
Over the past 15 years, we've had the opportunity to:
- Work with hundreds of business owners all over the country.
- Work with organizations of all sizes, from startups to multinational companies.
- Help clients hire their own in-house teams and mentor their existing teams.
- Play the role of CTO, traveling to overseas to help clients raise capital.
There's almost nothing we won't do to help the products we build succeed in the marketplace for our clients.