The Studio
Who you are actually hiring.
Amwaj Sama, أمواج السماء, waves of the sky. A small software studio that has been shipping since 2015.
Who
The person on the call
One person takes the call, writes the plan and writes the code. That is the whole trick, and it is also the whole constraint: it caps how much the studio can carry at once, which is why the answer is sometimes no and why it arrives in days rather than in a fortnight.
Years of it have produced a strong preference for boring technology and a low tolerance for meetings that end without a written decision. Both of those show up in the first week of working together, well before any code does.
The studio, in facts
- Who
- Mo Sfahan, writes the software, and takes the call
- Founded
- 2015, which is 11 years as this page was built
- Name
- أمواج السماء, waves of the sky
- mo@amwajsama.com
- Phone
- +971 58 620 0902
The Position
What we think
Most software projects fail on the plan, not the code. By the time anybody is arguing about a framework the expensive mistake has already been made, three weeks earlier, in a meeting where nobody wrote anything down. So we write things down, and we send them to you before we start, and if you do not recognise your own project in the document then we got it wrong and it costs an afternoon instead of a quarter.
We are not the cheapest and we do not try to be. A studio that wins on price has to make it back on volume, which means your project gets whoever is free. Ours does not work that way; the person on the call is the person who writes the code, which caps how much work we can take and is the main reason we sometimes say no.
We like boring technology. Postgres has been getting better for thirty years without drama and there is no version of your business where that is the wrong bet. Where we do reach for something newer we will tell you why, what it costs you in risk, and what the exit looks like if it turns out badly.
Ink Density 20 → 100
How a project actually runs
Five passes. The ordinals are nearly redundant, which was the test we set: delete them and the order should still read.
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20% ink
You describe it
Whatever you have. A sentence, a spreadsheet, a competitor's product with one thing about it you hate. If you want an NDA before you say a word, say so when you book and it will be signed before the call starts.
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40% ink
We listen and write it down
Then a plan: what gets built, in what order, and roughly what it costs. Fast and realistic are two constraints and they fight. Where they fight we tell you which one we are giving up, and why.
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60% ink
You approve it, or you change it
Both are normal, and the second one is more common. Nothing gets built off a plan you have not read.
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80% ink
We do the hard work
You hear from us on a schedule you set, rather than when we happen to feel like it, and the update includes whatever went badly that week. A status report with no bad news in it is a status report nobody read.
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100% ink
You use it, and we keep supporting it
That last clause is the reason the other four exist. Software that shipped and then rotted is not a delivery, it is a handover.
The Call
Come and find out whether we are wrong.
Twenty minutes is enough to tell. Bring the problem, not a brief.
Free, and the twenty minutes are with the person named above rather than with somebody whose job is to pass you on.