Thirty Years of JetByte

Today marks the start of the 30th year of JetByte Limited. Where did the time go?

We started as a ‘bum on seat’ contracting company so that Len could work for Credit Suisse Financial Products as a C++ developer back in 1997. This worked well, with interesting work, interesting people and lots of new skills to learn. When UK tax rules were changed we adjusted our working practices as the market changed and this turned out to be the best thing that could ever have happened. Rather than working for a single company for a long term; much like an employee might, we initially began working on much shorter, more focused contracts and then moved to working for multiple clients at the a time. This culminated in doing some fixed-price consultancy in Houston for an American oil and gas company and some C++ development work for PayPoint via to a connection we had with someone in the company.

The work for PayPoint was done under a contract that left us owning the IP rights to the ’non-business related’ code that we developed. This became The Server Framework and we began talking about our development on blogs and various chat systems; StackOverflow and the like. This led to us selling The Server Framework as a product and much more fixed-price work as the framework grew and our reliance on traditional contracts reduced.

By 2005 we had finished with investment banks and traditional contracting entirely and were completely focused on product development and consulting directly with clients. This way of working is much more flexible, enjoyable, risky and rewarding. Most of these clients would buy a license to various parts of The Server Framework and then have us build something with it for them. They would take over the development and move things forward; often coming back to us for more development assistance and consulting.

Over the years we’ve done lots and lots of fixed-price projects and, generally, delivered on-time to clients who were happy with the results. Amazingly, we’re still operating this way, toying with the idea of expanding the workforce, moving to new premises and still building server systems for clients using The Server Framework.

Lots has changed in the industry over the thirty years that we’ve been working like this, but, for us at least, the important things have stayed the same. We are still focused on working closely with our clients to discover what they really want built and then building it for them, on time and on budget. The most important tools at our disposal in achieving this are still the same; honest discussions about the state of the project and any potential delays, a focus on always prioritising the fixing of all known bugs before developing new code and the use of extensive unit tests to support all the work.

Looking forward to many more years writing the right code.