Knowledge base

An off-the-shelf package updates itself: the vendor releases a new version and every customer gets it automatically. Custom software has no such vendor. A development team built the application for you, and…

Commission custom software and you’re not hiring a product, you’re hiring a team. As a client you can barely judge the code; you can judge the people who write it. Yet conversations…

GDPR has applied since 2018 and touches every organisation that processes personal data. With off-the-shelf software, the supplier has already worked out what that means in practice. Custom software is different: every…

A system that does exactly what the project plan promised, yet three months later staff are working around it: that is how an investment in custom software evaporates. Not because anything is…

If you’re commissioning custom software for the first time, you’ll face an early choice: start with an MVP, or specify everything upfront and build the system in full from the outset? It…

PHP history: from simple script to modern programming language PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, a software developer at IBM. Lerdorf developed PHP (originally Personal Home Page, later PHP: Hypertext…