Another year, 2026.
We had an exciting 2025, with lots of interesting work on complicated projects. Our focus remains the same as ever, helping clients with high performance, reliable, server systems on Windows and Linux. This year we will begin our 30th year of software development consultancy and, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The highlight of the year was probably Phase 2 of our server development for our large, American postal company.
We’re pleased to have resumed work with our nameless, large, American postal company, who, back in 2019 took our mail-sorting server software into an extended pilot programme. Things went well, they have over 300 servers running the software and are processing over 554 million pieces of mail a day, each one of which results in multiple messages processed by our server software. They now want us to fix a couple of issues and extend the system to support TLS.
Welcome to 2025.
2024 was a good year for us, we continued to work with the secretive Online Gaming Company adding to and improving the cloud gaming server that we wrote for them. It’s quite nice to have a client that uses our server code to support over 1.4 billion monthly players and to continue to extend and improve the code that we’ve now been a part of for over 16 years.
2023 was a good year. We finished off a project for our Industrial Control Client and everyone seems happy, which is always nice.
Our work with the secretive Online Gaming Company is taking up most of our time as we continue to enhance the cloud gaming server that we wrote for them. They continue to go from strength to strength, which is good. We have been rolling out a series of changes into their live environment and increasing test coverage and our ability to test and debug using light-weight journals of communication sessions.
We’ve now reached the end of the recent embedded development project for our Industrial Control Client.
The final phase was made more complicated by the difficulty in debugging the changes. The embedded hardware had no screen, and the network debug facility that it supported was unreliable; it sometimes just lost messages. So the first step was to work around this issue with some debug messages in-line with the normal TCP/IP data channel from the hardware.
The second of our “reanimation” projects has reached a significant milestone. We ran the whole new system on the real hardware last week, and it mostly works. This is a big step for us and the client as the project has been quite complex in terms of how the development has been done.
As I said, our secret Industrial Control Client has had us working on a program that compiles in Visual C++ 6 on an XP VM.
We recently had an old client contact us with an unusual request. We last worked with VEXIS Systems Inc. back in 2010 when we extended the telephony server we’d built for them to support CLR hosting, using The Server Framework’s CLR Hosting Option. We then built a managed plugin system that integrated with the existing unmanaged system so that they could write their business logic in either unmanaged code or in a managed language such as C#.
It felt like things almost got back to normal in 2022, which was good. We like normal…
It was another good year for us and we’re still happy doing what we love, writing C++ on multiple platforms and developing interesting code for diverse clients.
Our gaming clients are all doing wonderfully well; our industrial control clients are happy and planning new projects; the large American postal company that will remain nameless is looking to extend the system we built for them a few years ago and our SIP TLS Gateway project now supports secure WebSockets as well as TCP.
2021 was another “interesting” year. We hope that things worked out OK for you. We’ve stayed nice and busy doing the things we love to do. So lots more C++ on various platforms for various clients.
For us, and a few of our clients, 2021 was the year that NUMA really started to be a thing. Mostly, up until now, we’ve been able to ignore NUMA hardware. Most clients scale out across cheap hardware and we’re used to dealing with that.
2020 was probably a challenging year for everyone. We were especially lucky in that all of our loved ones managed to stay safe and healthy and our working style was easy to adjust to fit with the various challenges of the year. We hope that things worked out OK for you too.
We ended up having a fairly good year. The games companies using The Server Framework were busy and had lots of work to send our way.
