Our team
Catalyst’s Agile SilverStripe Team is a group of six dedicated IT professionals with a combined professional experience in website and web-application development and management that exceeds 50 years! Three of us (Andreas, Luke and Russ) actually worked for SilverStripe Ltd for various periods between 2010 and 2014.
SilverStripe is a PHP development framework, and as such it follows that the team primarily comprises PHP developers. But PHP is only part of the story. The team also has experience with Perl, Bash, JavaScript, Golang, C# and Python, and that’s in addition to various flavours of SQL databases and operating systems as well as HTML, CSS, SASS, LESS, Gulp, Grunt, Bootstrap and the rest of it.
However, the team isn’t all about code. One of us is German and speaks both his native language and English fluently. Another is from India and speaks both Hindi and English fluently. Heck, one of us speaks English too, and he comes from England! Some are gamers, have been game developers or managed teams of game developers. One collects plastic discs called “records” and plays music on actual wooden musical instruments. Some go hard-out at the gym, and still others are fascinated by Blockchain technology and the wide-ranging potential of cryptocurrencies. Many of us also have our own families and like to pat small furry animals.
How we work
We’re an Agile team, which means we do our best work together, and we prefer it that way. It means we create better stuff through a standardised process of collaborative planning and peer review. As a team, we’ve found a democratic development process is much better than each of us having our own, and results in improved quality and happy clients. Project management, continuous integration, code style, and peer review are all addressed as a part of our team’s collaborative development process.
What we’ve done
The team has has experience customising solutions for large and well-known New Zealand organisations and companies. Projects that have spanned the entire range of possible web applications: web GIS, geolocation, catalogue systems, translated content, 3rd party authentication, RESTful web-service integration with S3, DeskPro, MailGun, Twitter, EBS4, Facebook, Sentry, RayGun, MaxMind and many others, all on top of PostgreSQL, MySQL and even SQLServer database backends.
The Team has experience successfully performing upgrade projects from older editions of SilverStripe and have even migrated clients from systems such as MS SharePoint and Drupal, while still retaining the legacy content and IA.
About SilverStripe
SilverStripe started out as just a Content Management System. Over the years it has evolved into something much more powerful. Did you know that the Content Management aspect of SilverStripe is actually just a module? This means SilverStripe can be used as a standalone framework, alongside the likes of Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, CodeIgniter and their ilk.
And content is now so much more than fields in a database. With SilverStripe, developers have the power to draw upon 3rd party data-sources, multiple databases and can override and modify core functionality, all using industry standard techniques, without having to hack anything. “Content” just got a whole new definition.
No framework is complete without a thriving module and plug-in ecosystem, and SilverStripe’s is rich and diverse. The Catayst SilverStripe team has hands-on module development expertise and several of us are maintainers of, or contributors to, open source SilverStripe modules.
Would you like to work with us?
We’d love to talk to you about how we can help, using SilverStripe. Get in touch.
