Laravel development for companies in Ulm

Ulm sits on the seam between Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, and the city’s economy is mixed accordingly. The region is Germany’s densest location for commercial vehicles, with pharmaceuticals, electrical engineering, metalworking and building materials alongside.

The university sets the tone. Ulm has the unusual case of academia and industry being closely interlocked in place and in people; battery and energy research has on top of that given the region a reputation reaching well beyond southern Germany. For us that mainly means we are often dealing with people who are technically sure-footed.

What reaches us from Ulm

Often it is about applications capturing a working process for which no finished product exists. A test rig that has to be documented. An approval chain with several people involved. A report somebody currently assembles by hand out of three exports.

Undertakings like these rarely fail on the technology. They fail because nobody has written the process down completely, since everybody knows it. Which is exactly why we start with the process and not with the data model. How that turns into an application is under Laravel development.

From a working prototype to something other people use

Where academia and industry sit this close together, a particular kind of project appears. There is already something that works. A script, a tool from a final-year project, an application one person built for themselves that four departments now use.

The jump from there to an application a business can rely on is regularly underestimated. Not because the code is bad, but because other things are missing: who may do what, what happens on a wrong entry, how somebody gets at their data while the author is on holiday. Those are not technical questions, and they take the larger share of the effort.

We are glad to take on undertakings like these, because the thinking about the subject has already been done. What we settle beforehand is the expectation. A working prototype does not become a product by being tidied up.

So before we estimate, we look at what can be carried over and what has to be built new. What an assessment like that looks like is under consulting and code audit.

The short journey pays off

An hour’s travel sounds like a detail and changes how the work goes. When a question comes up in the project that is better settled in front of the machine than on the phone, we go. With clients in Munich or Freiburg we would have to solve the same question differently, usually with more preparation and less doing it in passing.

In practice that means: kick-off on site, fixed dates remotely after that, and in between the option of coming out at short notice when it helps. For Ulm that mixture is still realistic.

What usually slows a project down here

Not the technology but the availability of the people who know the process. In businesses running at capacity, the person who could answer every question is exactly the one with no time.

There is an unremarkable trick against that. We collect questions and ask them together in a fixed slot rather than chasing them one at a time. An hour every fortnight with the right person achieves more than ten emails answered between other tasks. Plan that in and the duration drops noticeably; leave it out and you wait.