Journal

Thinking in public.

Essays on building software, building a company, social impact, and young people in technology. Written by the team at Ally Group.

Building software for decades, not quarters.

Most software companies are organised around the next eighteen months. What changes when you organise around the next thirty years?

Treating youth-software work as charity is how it gets underfunded, under-designed, and abandoned. We treat it as a permanent line of business.

On why the most interesting thing a software company can do, over the long run, is build boring software extremely well.

A small note on what a Dutch operating culture actually looks like in practice — and why we chose it as a default, not a decoration.

Most public-sector software projects end with a well-designed PDF. Here is how we try not to.

What we learned shipping a general-ledger product into Dutch mid-market finance teams for twelve months.

A short note on why Ally Group is deliberately lean — and why most of the structure other companies accumulate is simply absent here.

A view from the Netherlands on what the gap between consumer software and youth-services software actually costs, and who pays for it.