The first step is always the hardest. How fine that even for such things as beginnings, we IT people have developed a pattern that eases surpassing such hurdles: Hello world! The first and almost mandatory string ever printed in a new programming language just as easily fits the purpose of getting started with this, our very first, blog post.
We could just have started in medias res, with the upcoming blog post on making extensive use of front-matter in phrozn, but we felt that an introduction to this blog section, and more generally, to the company hosting it — as well as many other services — was a necessity. I guess there are two questions that we should respond to first and foremost: What is this new company all about? and What is the purpose of this blog?.
tentwentyfour1024, founded in June 2013, was born from the idea — or rather the wish — to offer an IT service to the Luxembourgian market that focuses on one thing above everything else: Thoroughly tested and thus high quality code. I would dare say that this is a pretty novel approach for web developers in the local market, with barely a handful of our competitors offering a similar service, in one form or another.
What probably distinguishes us most from other businesses in the web-sector is that We’re not a Web-agency! Where most Web-agencies focus on creating fancy Websites but lack the expertise to create functional, working and scaling code to drive these sites — or the necessary skills to set them up, once created — we focus on application development according to established patterns and methodologies first.
Our approach doesn’t focus on code only though. The Behaviour Driven Development methodology that we adhere to is also, maybe even most importantly, targeting the relations we cultivate with our customers. Listening to them and to their business requirements is the very first step towards creating functional software. But it is equally the sixth, the twelfth, and so on, refining and improving applications as we iterate over our customers’ needs.
To learn more about what exactly we mean with high quality and thoroughly tested code, I would like to refer you to our Know-How section accessible from the front page
Honesty with our customers is one of the foundations of this company. So we’ll be honest with you about the purpose of this blog. It’s really simply: We’re trying to build a reputation and to drive traffic to our Website. Everyone does that, albeit the means may differ. Some use advertisement, others send out junk mail, and again others try to brand as many Websites as possible. Our approach will be sharing our know-how and experiences, thus giving something to the community and hopefully earning back some visits and — in the end — revenue from it.
We’re going to write about a range of topics, but the theme will generally be the same: tools we use, patterns that we employ, work-arounds we discovered and conventions we visited.
The authors will vary as we’ll be doing our best to generate content and thus expertise from the assembled staff. Writing isn’t easy, even more so when you’re not writing in your native language, so on one hand, we invite you to comment on our posts and ask questions if you find something to be unclear, and on the other hand, we hope that we’ll all learn from doing this and gradually get better at it. Good writing skills should definitely come in handy at some point in a career and will help us working towards the goal of not having our employees be one-trick ponies.
We hope that you’ll enjoy our posts and maybe even working with us!