About us - Focused and experienced, that's us.
We are a software development studio based in Los Angeles, California
We are a small but highly experienced software development studio, based in Los Angeles, California. We have our own products on the way to market but are also open to helping others' software projects succeed. That may be in pure software development, in mentoring or training your development staff, or in improving your software development process.
Our philosophy - Do the right thing the right way.
In our experience, the best way to meet a tight timeline or a tight budget is to focus on quality. This is both quality in the software itself, but also quality in understanding the customer's problem. Nothing hurts a project more than choosing the wrong solution to the problem at hand. And second to that is implementing that solution in the wrong way.
We believe that when the tech team is in the room with the customers and participates in the work of understanding the problem, the entire effort benefits greatly. Having close communication between the customer, product, and engineering is the best and quickest way to get to the right solution.
This doesn't mean always choosing the hardest or most complicated solution, in the proverbial name of "Quality!". It means deeply understanding the problem and the potential solutions - and then choosing the right thing. Frequently, the right choice today is something smaller than the best long term solution. But by deeply understanding, we put our projects on the right path that leads it to where it needs to go in the most effective way.
We hold this true for our own projects as well. We strive for really understanding the problem at hand and implementing a high-quality and flexible solution to it.
Our Team
James Clover
Founder
Where our name comes from - A nod to the game that started our journey.
One of the earliest and most popular computer games was called Colossal Cave Adventure - or just ADVENT on the mainframe computers it ran on. It is a text-based game where you explore a cave complex, solve puzzles, and gather treasure. The original game was based on Kentucky's Mammoth Cave system, mapped by Will Crowther and Pat Crowther.
Probably the most widely known part of the game were the two mazes - a "twisty little maze of passages all alike" and a "twisty little maze of passages all different". These two mazes are classic examples of puzzles, but they also have a philosophical meaning to us. Being lost is a condition that we all experience, but is a particular part of the adventurer's journey - so these two mazes touch something deep in our storyteller selves.
And of course, when a software project is lost - when tech debt seems to be everywhere, when you realize that communication problems mean you've been building the wrong solutions, when it seems like your development process just isn't working - we can help.