Articles from Watkyn’s leaders and developers on topics related to our work: Quickbase and Caspio development, custom software, ERP for government and higher education, and integrating AI into operational software.
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Fixed price vs. time and materials: who carries the risk on your software project?
Every software development contract I’ve seen comes in one of two forms. Either you pay a fixed price for a product described in advance, or you pay for the developer’s time and get billed as the work goes along. Who carries the risk when the work doesn’t go according to plan? It’s an important question…
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Shadow AI on campus: how colleges can find it, govern it, and replace it
When ChatGPT was publicly released in the fall of 2022, I was the chief academic officer and interim provost of a small college in New York City. The faculty and I immediately recognized the dangers this posed to serious learning and academic integrity—but that’s a topic for another post. What wasn’t as obvious at the…
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What custom business software actually costs in 2027
When I’m looking into a new product or service online, the pricing page is one of the first places I go. I like a company that lists its prices and lets me compare plans, and I’m glad that has become the norm for software subscriptions: the Pricing link is in the top menu or, failing…
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Your Quickbase developer left. Now what?
We’ve been building and rescuing Quickbase apps since 2015, and we get a version of this call a few times a year. The person who built and maintained an organization’s Quickbase apps has retired, resigned, been laid off, or just stopped answering email, and now nobody knows how the apps work. If that’s you, here’s…
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What I learned vibe coding with Claude Code and Codex
I own a software company full of programmers who are better than I am. Here’s why I let an AI write my code anyway, and what it got wrong.
