What East Codes is hired to do
Every engagement starts with a written scope and ends with you holding the code, the infrastructure and the documentation. What varies is how much of the middle we do.
Systems built around how the work happens
Spreadsheets and generic SaaS get a business a long way, then start costing it time. A custom application removes the manual steps between the work and the record of the work.
Applications are built on Laravel with Inertia and Vue, typed end to end, and covered by tests that run on every push. That stack is boring on purpose: another engineer can pick it up without a translator.
Deliverables
- A working application on your own domain and infrastructure
- Source in a repository you own, with readable history
- Automated tests over the paths the business depends on
- Roles and permissions matched to who actually does what
- Data import from whatever you are running today
From first build to App Store review
Mobile work is treated as a full release process, not a compile step. That includes provisioning, signing, TestFlight distribution, review submission and the support obligations that follow it.
Where an app is one face of a larger system, the API and the mobile client are designed together rather than bolted to each other afterwards.
Release process
- Certificates, identifiers and signing set up in your account
- Builds distributed to testers before anything reaches review
- Store listing, privacy declarations and review responses
- Crash reporting and a plan for the first patch release
Getting systems to agree
Payment processors, point-of-sale, accounting, CRM and whatever the vendor calls an API this year. The hard part is not the request; it is knowing what happened when the request fails.
Integrations ship with retries, idempotency, an audit trail and an interface a non-engineer can use to answer the question the customer is asking.
What gets connected
- Payments and checkout
- Point-of-sale and ordering systems
- Accounting and billing platforms
- Internal databases and reporting warehouses
- Public APIs published for your own customers
Set up once, documented, handed over
Deployment is part of the build, not a phase at the end. Environments are provisioned early so shipping to production is routine rather than a scheduled risk.
Everything runs in your own accounts, under your own billing. Credentials transfer at handover and nothing is left that only East Codes can reach.
Operational baseline
- Staging and production environments that match
- Zero-downtime deploys from the main branch
- Automated backups, with a restore tested before launch
- Error tracking and uptime alerts routed to a real inbox
- A runbook covering deploys, rollbacks and recovery
Bring it current without stopping the business
Applications on unsupported framework or language versions are a security problem before they are a productivity one. A rewrite is rarely the answer, and never the cheap one.
Work starts with a review of what the system does and what it costs to maintain, then proceeds in upgradeable stages with tests added ahead of each change.
Codebase review
- Dependency and security audit, written up plainly
- A staged upgrade path with cost attached to each stage
- An honest answer on rewrite versus repair
A second opinion before you commit
The expensive decisions are made in the first two weeks: the data model, where the boundaries sit, what you build and what you buy. They are also the cheapest decisions to review.
You get a document in plain language that your team or your other vendor can act on. If the recommendation is that you do not need custom software, that is what it will say.
What this answers
- Should this be built, bought, or left alone for now
- Will the current architecture hold at ten times the load
- Is the estimate we have been given reasonable
- What should the first engineering hire own
Not sure which of these you need?
Describe the problem rather than the solution. Working out the shape of the engagement is part of the first conversation, and it is free.