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System software

The software with no user interface and no marketing page: the service that moves data between two systems that were never meant to talk, the job that has to run every night, the desktop tool a factory floor depends on. Unglamorous, and the first thing anyone notices when it stops.

What it covers

Long-running services, desktop software, device integrations and the internal tooling nobody markets but everybody depends on. Written to be debugged at 2am by someone who did not write it.

  • Backend services and job pipelines
  • Desktop and embedded software
  • Legacy system integration
  • Performance and reliability work

How we approach it

Written to be debugged by someone else
Clear logs, useful error messages, obvious structure. The measure of this kind of software is how fast an engineer who has never seen it can work out what went wrong at two in the morning.
Failure is designed for, not discovered
Networks drop, disks fill, upstream APIs return nonsense at the worst time. We decide up front what the system does in each case — retry, buffer, alert, or refuse — instead of finding out in production.
We meet legacy systems where they are
Fixed-width files, SOAP endpoints, a database somebody is not allowed to alter. We integrate with what exists rather than making a rewrite the precondition for progress.

Where we differ

Why bring this to us rather than anyone else.

We take on the work others decline
Plenty of shops will not touch an integration with a twenty-year-old system, or quote it so high it's a polite no. It's a large part of what we do, and it's usually the highest-leverage software a business can commission.
Small stack, held deliberately
We work in a short list of tools we know deeply rather than whatever's newest. That's what makes an obscure production problem a debugging session instead of a research project — and it means the software is still supportable in five years.
We're still there when it breaks
Infrastructure software has a long tail of rare failures that only show up months in. We don't hand over and disappear; if it's ours and it misbehaves, you have someone to call who knows the system.

When to call us

You probably need this if…

  • Two systems that should talk to each other are bridged by someone exporting a CSV
  • A nightly job fails often enough that checking it is now somebody's routine
  • Hardware on-site produces data nobody can get at centrally
  • Something critical is slow and nobody can say why

Questions

Our system is old and badly documented. Is that a problem?
It's normal. We start with a short investigation to map what's actually there — which is often the first accurate documentation the system has had — and quote the real work from that rather than from a guess.
Can you work with our in-house team?
Yes, and it's often the better arrangement. Your team knows the domain; we bring the capacity and the outside perspective. We work in your repositories, to your review process.

Also from us

Next step

Tell us what you are trying to fix.

A couple of paragraphs is plenty. We will tell you honestly whether this is the right service for it, and whether we are the right team — usually within two working days.

Start a projector email connect@riftwaretechnologies.com