API design, database modelling, the painful hour at the start of every project. PHP since version 5, Postgres since 9.4. Writes most of our public-facing technical posts.
About the studio
A small studio that has thought hard about being small.
BackendFlowAgency has been four people since 2021 — that's the size at which we can each hold every project in our heads. We have never grown to five, even when offered the work, because the second you can't hold every project in your head, you stop being the studio you set out to be.
Who
Four people. The same four, every engagement.
We don't sub-contract. Whoever you meet on the kickoff is the same person writing the code.
Infrastructure, deployments, the on-call rota. Previously SRE at a Sevilla fintech for six years. Believes in long-running processes and short-running meetings.
Full-stack with a strong preference for the back end. Joined in 2020 from a Granada-based GovTech. Owns our internal CI/CD setup and the testing harness boilerplate.
Half of her week is code, half is editing what we ship to clients. The reason any of you ever hear back. Joined in 2022.
Principles
Six working principles
These aren't taglines. They're the six things we say no to projects over.
/01
We write before we code
Every engagement opens with a written technical proposal — usually 8 to 14 pages. If we can't write it down, we can't build it.
/02
Three projects at any time
A hard cap that we have honoured for seven straight years. It's the only way the work stays this close to the ground.
/03
Plain text wherever possible
Decision logs in Markdown. Specs in Markdown. We do not use a wiki and we do not use Notion.
/04
Async first, calls last
Two scheduled calls per week, both capped at 30 minutes. Most of the work happens in pull requests and shared documents.
/05
No timesheets to clients
We track hours internally for our own planning. We don't bill them to you and we don't ask you to approve them.
/06
You own everything we make
On final invoice payment, all bespoke code and design transfer in full. We retain only what we built and licensed before your project.