Software engineering, cloud solutions and ongoing technical support
Information technology company
BASIC SHIRTS MN LIMITED designs, builds, integrates and supports software and cloud infrastructure — with the documentation, testing and observability that keep those systems workable long after release.
Custom software and web applications
Cloud architecture and deployment automation
Integration, consulting and ongoing support
Introduction
We work with organisations whose operations depend on software: internal platforms that coordinate daily work, customer-facing applications, and the integrations that hold them together. The starting point is rarely a blank page — it is usually a system that needs to do more, cost less, or become safe to change.
Our method is deliberately unglamorous. Understand the process, model the data honestly, implement in reviewable increments, automate the checks, and make production behaviour visible. Decisions are written down with their trade-offs so the reasoning survives staff changes and years of iteration.
The result is software your team can operate confidently: documented, tested, observable, and free of dependencies on any single person's memory.
Capabilities
The engineering foundations applied across every engagement, whatever the service area.
01
Service boundaries, data models and interface contracts designed for change rather than for a single release.
02
APIs, background processing, scheduled jobs and transactional logic built with explicit error handling.
03
Accessible, responsive interfaces with a documented component structure and measured performance.
04
Schema design, migrations, reporting queries and pipelines that keep records consistent across systems.
05
Infrastructure as code, containerisation and deployment pipelines that make environments reproducible.
06
Structured logging, metrics, tracing and alerting designed with the feature rather than bolted on later.
Discipline 01
When a process is specific to how your organisation works, a bespoke system can encode the real rules — including the exceptions that generic products force you to work around.
Discipline 02
Cloud work is judged on three things: whether environments can be recreated from source, whether production behaviour is visible, and whether cost tracks real demand.
Networking, compute, storage and identity defined as code, applied through review.
Container images, automated pipelines and a documented rollback route for every release.
Backups with tested restores, health checks and recovery procedures written down in advance.
Resource sizing and usage examined against observed load rather than initial assumptions.
Discipline 03
Most operational friction is not caused by a missing application. It is caused by systems that hold overlapping information and never agree.
We map every interface that already exists — APIs, exports, scheduled transfers, files moved by hand — and decide which of them should remain. A canonical identifier strategy and field-level mapping are agreed before code is written.
Integrations are then built for the realities of distributed systems: idempotent operations, retries with backoff, error queues that can be inspected, and reconciliation that proves both sides still match.
Integration health is monitored like any other production concern, with alerts for failure rates and growing backlogs rather than silent divergence.
Discipline 04
Independent assessment before commitments are made — particularly for decisions that are expensive to reverse.
A
An assessment of the current design against the objectives it is now expected to serve.
B
Options compared against explicit criteria, including what your team can maintain.
C
Sequencing, cut-over steps, data movement and rollback defined before work starts.
D
Phased plan with dependencies, risks and estimation ranges suitable for budgeting.
Process
The same sequence applies to a new build, a migration or a maintenance handover; only the depth of each step changes.
Objectives, constraints, systems in scope, and the measurement that will define success.
Architecture direction, scope boundary, sequencing and estimation ranges, written down.
Reviewed increments with automated checks running on every change.
Testing against agreed criteria, including integration points, error paths and performance.
Automated deployment, post-release checks and a documented rollback route.
Monitoring in production, findings resolved, next increment planned from evidence.
Assurance
Practices applied continuously through delivery rather than inspected at the end.
Q1
Each change is read by another engineer, with attention to error handling, readability and test coverage.
Q2
Unit tests for logic, integration tests across boundaries, end-to-end checks for critical paths.
Q3
Linting, type checks, builds and test suites run automatically before anything is merged.
Q4
Access scoped narrowly for people and services alike, with secrets held in managed stores.
Q5
Third-party packages tracked, reviewed and updated as part of routine maintenance.
Q6
Encrypted transport, validated inputs and considered retention behaviour as baseline requirements.
Illustrative examples
The scenarios below are illustrative examples written to show how we approach typical technical situations. They are not descriptions of specific clients or completed projects.
Example scenario
An operations team coordinates work through shared spreadsheets, with rules held informally. The engagement models the workflow as explicit states and transitions, migrates historical records, and delivers an application with role-based access and an audit trail. Reporting that previously required manual consolidation becomes a query against a single source.
Example scenario
A long-running application is deployed manually, and environments have drifted apart. The work defines infrastructure as code, containerises the application, introduces an automated pipeline with rollback, and adds monitoring and alerting. Environments can then be recreated from source rather than reconstructed from memory.
Example scenario
A finance system and a customer platform hold overlapping records that gradually diverge. The engagement establishes canonical identifiers, field-level mapping and queue-based synchronisation with idempotent operations, an inspectable error queue, and a scheduled reconciliation report that surfaces mismatches early.
Example scenario
A system arrives without documentation, tests or a reliable build. The first phase reconstructs the build, adds test coverage around the highest-risk logic, documents the architecture and deployment steps, and produces a prioritised list of findings — so that later feature work proceeds on a known foundation.
Collaboration
We aim to be an easy technical counterpart: clear about progress, direct about risk, and straightforward to plan around.
Each engagement has one agreed written channel, a shared backlog, and a regular update stating what changed, what is next and what is blocked. Anything that affects scope, cost or architecture is raised when it appears rather than at the end of a phase.
Where an internal team is involved, we follow their repository conventions and review process, and we document what we build so understanding is shared rather than concentrated on our side.
Support
Most of a system's life happens after launch. Maintenance is treated as engineering work, not an afterthought.
Defects investigated to root cause, with the regression check added alongside the fix.
Runtime, dependency and security patches applied on a predictable schedule.
Alerts triaged, noisy signals tuned, and recurring conditions addressed at source.
Usage reviewed as it changes, with sizing and query work based on measurements.
Small enhancements delivered in agreed increments rather than accumulated into a rewrite.
Runbooks, configuration notes and architecture records kept current as the system evolves.
FAQ
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Company and contact information
Software development, cloud solutions, IT consulting, systems integration and ongoing technical support. Enquiries are handled in writing by email.
Contact
basicshirtsmn.com
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