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Siftware Apps, and the servers they run on
■ Siftware

The app nobody can deploy any more

Inherited an app, lost the developer, or just been told nobody knows how to put changes live? Start here.

You know that app you inherited? The one sitting in the corner keeping you up at night?

Maybe your last developer went travelling and never came back. Maybe the agency that built it has moved on to other things. Or maybe nobody left at all, and you've just been told nobody knows the password to deploy changes live.

We've seen that one before. We've been taking over other people's apps since 2006, and it's still a good part of what we do.

What happens first

If it's urgent (it's been hacked, or a server's gone down and isn't coming back up) the first job is the fire. We get the app running on our own systems so we can work on it without touching yours, and we put a fix in.

Once the fire's out, or if there never was one, we work through the same steps every time:

  1. Get it running here. A copy on our systems, built from the code, not from a snapshot of somebody's server.
  2. Make it portable. It builds from the repo, it deploys with one command, and the knowledge stops living in one person's head. If the server dies at three in the morning, anyone competent can rebuild it. Not just us.
  3. Write the audit and risk report. What's actually in there, what's out of date, what's fragile, what's slow and why. In plain English, each finding ranked. The report's yours whether or not you keep us on.
  4. Agree what to fix first. A prioritised list, worked through month by month. We won't go over an agreed budget without asking you first.

After that we keep it running, like any other. What keeping it running means

What we'll tell you

Sometimes the answer's a rewrite. Usually it isn't. Most of the apps we take over have years left in them once they're up to date and portable, and we'll say so, even though a rewrite would be a bigger job for us.

And sometimes the honest answer is that it should move somewhere else entirely. If so, we'll say, and we can do the move ourselves. We've done it before: moved a client off code we'd looked after for years and built them something new.

If an AI wrote some of it

More and more, the inherited app isn't one a person wrote. Code generated by an AI tool, merged by somebody who's since moved on, with no tests and no record of what the machine did.

It's the same job, really. We read it, put tests round it before we change it, and tell you what's sound. How we build with AI

In their words

"When our previous developer suddenly disappeared Siftware came to our rescue and immediately undertook a comprehensive audit and risk report, identifying all our performance issues and highlighting potential security risks."

Tony Ingram, Owner, Car & Classic

If you'd rather read first

If you'd like to see if Siftware is a good fit for you and your project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.