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heaps goodstudio

actually.

A software engineering studio in Tallinn, with roots in Australian payments and banking. You work with the engineers writing the code, from the first call to production.

TLL 59.4370° N
SYD 33.8688° S

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No. 01A definition

First, the name.

heaps good/hiːps ˈɡʊd/

adverbial phrase, Australian.

  1. Emphatically, genuinely good.
  2. The standard to which software should be built.

Usage“Nah, the pies at the Central Market are heaps good.” - Adelaide, casual. “Failover kicked in mid-demo and nobody noticed. Heaps good.” - Tallinn, standup.

See also: “she’ll be right” (antonym, in engineering contexts).

Origin: Adelaide, South Australia. Current usage: Tallinn, daily.

No. 02The argument

When anyone can generate code, judgement is the job.

Code got cheap. A prompt and an afternoon can turn out ten thousand lines by dinner, and we think that is genuinely good news. Typing was never the hard part of the work, and now nobody has to pretend it was.

What is left is the part that always mattered: judgement. What to call a thing. Where one system ends and the next begins. How it fails at three in the morning, who finds out, and in what order. A model will write the code either way, confidently, at volume. It cannot want the right outcome.

So that is the studio. We build the last part by hand: the naming, the boundaries, the failure modes, the restraint to not build the thing you do not need. Opinions, held in person, by the people writing the code.

No. 03The work

What we actually do.

No. 04The record

A couple of worked examples.

Representative, not name-dropped: the kind of problem the studio is built for, written up plainly.

No. 05The back page

You made it to the back page. Good.

Tell us what you are building. We will tell you what we think.

That is the whole pitch.

Send a few paragraphs about the thing: what it is, where it hurts, what you are worried about. You will get back what we actually think.

Sometimes that is a plan. Sometimes it is "don't build this yet," which is free, and often the more useful of the two.

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Heaps Good Studio · Tallinn, Estonia