1stDevelop

SW

Where we work

Two industries where "move fast" is the wrong advice

In finance and healthcare the cost of being wrong is not a bad quarter. It is money that moved to the wrong account, a record disclosed to the wrong person, a regulator asking for evidence you cannot produce.

That does not mean building slowly. It means building so that changes are small, reversible and evidenced — which, once it is in place, is faster than the alternative, because nobody is frightened of the deploy button.

What we build

Four kinds of work

Untangling

Breaking up what has grown together

Carving a large application into parts along real business boundaries, so one change stops meaning one full regression cycle and one release train.

Integration

Making systems talk

Payment rails, core banking, HL7 and FHIR, insurers, labs, national services — and the ones with no API at all, which need patience rather than cleverness.

Build

New products and internal tools

Web applications, APIs and the unglamorous internal software that a department actually runs on and nobody ever budgets for.

Rescue

Projects that have stalled

Half-finished, undocumented, or written by people who have left. We start by reading it, not by proposing a rewrite.

How we work

Rules that come from the industries, not from us

PCI DSS, GDPR, medical device software rules, whatever your regulator expects of change control — these shape the design from the first week rather than being bolted on before an audit. In practice that means narrowing what handles sensitive data, so most of the system falls outside the expensive scope entirely.

Every release leaves evidence behind: what changed, who approved it, what was tested, how to put it back. Not because it is satisfying, but because the day somebody asks, the answer either exists or it does not.

How it runs

An engagement, start to finish

Stage 01

Read what exists

Code, data, integrations and the parts only one person understands. No recommendations until the picture is real.

Stage 02

Agree the first thing worth shipping

Small enough to be in production in weeks, useful enough that stopping there would still have been worth it.

Stage 03

Build in the open

Your repositories, your infrastructure, your team in the reviews. Nothing happens in a room you cannot see into.

Stage 04

Release without ceremony

Automated tests, staged rollout, a way back. If a deploy needs a meeting, the pipeline is wrong.

Stage 05

Leave it maintainable

Documented, tested and handed to your engineers. If nobody on your side can change it after we go, we have failed at the actual job.

Working with us

Small teams, your codebase

We work in small teams alongside yours rather than taking a specification away for six months. Where you have engineers, they stay on the work and finish knowing the system; where you do not, we build so that a future team can pick it up without a rewrite.

We would rather scope a project down until it is honest than win it and discover in month four that the estimate was fiction.

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