Three decades of shipping software — and the tools we built along the way.
Rock Court LLC is a small software and media company. We have been shipping software for about thirty years — through the dot-com bust, the 2008 crash and COVID. The technology changed completely each time. The reasons projects fail barely moved at all, and most of them still have very little to do with the technology.
That is why we ended up building our own tools. We needed a writing application, then a faster way to build it, so we wrote a framework and then a platform on top of it that turns a description of an application into a working one. The products we sell were built with that platform, and we use them ourselves: our publishing imprint writes with one of them, and another runs its own marketing. Using our own software is how we find out what is genuinely wrong with it.
When we work with a client, the first step is finding the opportunities that will actually strengthen the business without overextending it. We start with a review of the business and its processes, then the customer experience and how the business goes to market. From there we look for openings — often technology that is ordinary in one industry and unheard of in another. Then design and architecture, then iterative development that ships the core before the enhancements.
The process is structured enough to be reliable and loose enough to adapt. The part that matters most is the earliest one: being honest about what technology will fix, and what it will not. Plenty of problems that arrive described as software problems are not.