Technology

When building a startup tech product, we want to start small – nimble, efficient and cost effective, but be able to scale big and quickly. We expect to pivot the business model – so we need to pivot technology as well. Doing so in the modern cloud-powered world, requires cloud-native architecture – driven by automation and agility, utilizing many existing managed services, self-healing and reactive to change, fully monitored and transparent. At TSF, we start every tech product, no matter how small, with these principles in mind – so we can scale quickly and scale big when opportunity arises.

Startup world thrives on agility – quick off the mark, fast paces changes on the market demand. At TSF, we look to apply the same principles to software design and architecture, which is why we adopted microservices as a natural extension of the cloud-native architecture. Encapsulating the responsibility within the well defined microservice boundary allows us to focus on a specific problem at hand, build and test each service in isolation, with established API-enabled and asynchronous communication channels. Starting from those simple building blocks, we can compose responsive, resilient and elastic system, that can be operated on a small scale to begin with, and scale horizontally as quickly as required.

Containers are fundamental to our development process, they enable us to combine the best technology choices, free us to run the same code in different clouds and environments and simplify the deployment and management processes allowing us to focus on the real business value problems.

Every startup is different but most need to bring the product to the consumer wherever they are and whatever device they own. There is still no single solution for all platforms. But by using the right tools and technology we can efficiently build an application once and deploy to many platforms.

We are strong believers in collaboration on every level – creating clusters of startups that help each other while growing their business models is our goal – and the same applies to tech. Adopting Open Source libraries and frameworks, allows us to stay ahead of the curve, using the best new breed of technology for common tasks, ensuring we have time and capacity to innovate where it really matters, at the core of the tech business we’re building.

We are polyglot multilingual developers using the best language for the task at hand. For example: Scala for Fintech platforms that need strict guarantees and Python to leverage image processing or scientific computing libraries. But the goto choice for most startups is Javascript/Typescript. Javascript is relatively easier to learn and to recruit for than other languages. It has one of the largest communities providing tutorials and open source libraries including mature frameworks for the full application stack, supporting Web, Mobile App, Server and Database components, so your development team only needs to learn one language.

Designing and building scalable tech products must be always viewed through the prism of efficient integration and release as well operational excellence. In order to deliver a holistic tech product vision, it is critical to consider these less functional aspects of any platform with the same critical view as features and functions. Devops and Site Reliability Engineering are common names for such practices – for us, names are not that important. What is important, is to have a well defined, automated, continuous integration and deployment process, with one-click releases and easy rollback and complete transparency and observability of the internal functional of any product – including log aggregation, monitoring and alerts. At TSF, we make sure that such continuous delivery practices are included within the development process, so they are not as an afterthought, but as a key part of the process once the first line of code is written.

Startup mantra ‘deliver quickly and deliver often’ is embedded within TSF culture from design and architecture, to tech stack selection and team structure, the aim is always to deliver quality, fast and often. However, we are aware that sometimes, the technology itself can become a core marketable part of the product. Think of it as a technology as a marketing or a sales tool, be it to attract the best talent, or prove credentials regarding scalability or security in a certain sector of industry. Just like the scale of Netflix introduced the concept of Chaos Engineering (where system is designed against a constant forced failures within it), we have seen first hand how fintech products are rigorously reviewed their security and encryption features, or Scala / Akka programming ecosystem showcasing cutting edge of software development of scalable reactive system. With this experience, we are able to select the right technology for the job – looking the speed and flexibility of course, but always considering alternative choices that would help product adoption and growth