We build high-quality bespoke software, specifically for port agencies.

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Who We Are

We’re a team of technology builders based in Dublin, Ireland. We understand the leverage gained by building customer-facing digital products underpinned by software that drives internal business operations. We're also intimately familiar with the pitfalls and requirements (internal tools, integrations, maintenance, behaviour change) encountered when building this kind of software.We believe though their are many out there building software there are few who are taking a simplified and focussed approach. In software one size does not fit all, so lets stop trying to make it.

Leadership Team

Tony Ennis

Tony has spent 12 years building technology and teams for software-supported-businesses - first as CTO at Web Summit (real world events), and then as co-founder and CTO at First Circle (small business lending).

AJ Browne

AJ Browne was formerly COO at Mustard and brings a structured, scalable approach to client, engineering and product management.

How We Work

Small Teams, No Buffer

Each Tonic team has a Developer and a PM who work hand in hand, and who both liaise directly with business-side stakeholders and teams. This means there is no hiding, no back-and-forth, and no lost information. Additionally, communication skills are the #1 job requirement for all of our developers.

High Speed, High Output

We’ve built a set of processes that can turn ideas into working software very quickly. Our teams are small, but highly skilled, nimble, and equipped with a set of tools to cater for 99% of the software requirements your business will encounter.

Fluid & Adaptable

We find that for most companies - goals, milestones and priorities can change weekly. Our teams and processes are built to reflect that. We won’t spend weeks on a gantt chart and product spec that’ll be abandoned after a few days. We’ll spec out a meaningful piece of work, build it, and go from there. This iterative approach, coupled with High Speed, High Output, leaves room to experiment and grow.

Don't compromise on resources

Pay for the resources you always need, without sacrificing the resources that are only occasionally needed. For most projects, there are some roles that are only needed during certain periods - for example at the beginning of a project, or when a large new feature is being built - you may need an architect, a CTO, or a full time designer. And during other periods, these resources are not required. Most teams are forced to take an all-or-nothing approach to this - either hiring people full time and finding work for them to do, or neglecting that function entirely and paying the price with stability and quality over time.

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Why it Works

Simplification

The software industry is unique in that the most dominant software practices are created and popularized by the most dominant technology companies - companies that have hundreds of millions of customers, and hundreds of thousands of employees - and thus very different requirements to businesses that operate on a smaller scale (read: 99% of them). For example - the most dominant frontend framework - React - was built by Facebook, and the most dominant infrastructure provider - AWS - was built by Amazon. These tools can be useful when used correctly, but most software teams adopt them blindly, creating enormous complexity that compounds, forcing them to either only hire very talented and expensive developers or agencies, or incur massive technical debt that hamstrings their business as it grows. At Tonic, we’ve spent 2 years building a set of patterns and recommendations and compiled them into a book (The Tonic Methodology) - which describes how to avoid this, and ensure that your technology remains both high-quality and maintainable over time. Not only that - because our practices are well documented - if you ever do need to pass them on to another team, the onboarding overhead is minimal. We’ve been using this approach quite successfully to build for two years and proven that it works. We call it No Nonsense Software Development.

Standardization

By not working with legacy codebases, and being very intentional about what frameworks, patterns, and tools we use, we've built a system that covers 99% of software requirements, that can be mastered by smart developers in months, not years.

Fractionalization

There are only two daily-recurring roles needed to ship high quality software - a Developer and a PM. But there are other roles (CTO, Design) that are needed on demand. By running multiple projects, we can afford to hire these resources, and ensure they’re available as and when they’re needed.

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