Today is not Just Another Day, Today we Launch the Karumi Blog!

It’s been 3 months already since Karumi was officially launched! We are happily up and running and super busy which is just good news we are crazy happy about.

It was about time to kick off the awesome Karumi blog and share experiences we are collecting along the way as well as technical contributions. This blog will also serve to share the projects we are working on. We can’t wait to tell you about the very exciting client partners and challenging projects we are working with at the moment.

In this first post we would like to go back to the basics and  talk about Karumi’s culture and the software services we offer so you get to know our heartbeat and what makes us wake up every morning (with a big smile upon our faces BTW).

“Karumi, oh, I love the name!” Well thank you. Let me tell you a little bit about the meaning behind Karumi. Karumi is a Japanese term which literally means ‘lightness’. Karumi represents an aesthetic principle used in haiku poetry. It was developed by Matsuo Bash? (1644 – 1694) the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. Basho’s work was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism and Karumi is perhaps one of the most important and least understood principles of haiku poetry. I suggest you to take a closer look at it, it’s a fascinating concept!

The minute we heard about “Karumi” we all loved it (company naming is a craze, those who have been in that situation know what I’m talking about…) and we unanimously voted for it, yay! Such meaning of lightness has served us as a motif to shape our company culture and work approach. We define ourselves as an intentionally small and agile studio. We are all about being lean and light in the way we deal with product design, development and delivery. Equally important, at Karumi, we foster a professional environment based on open and effective communication and collaboration, both internally as close-knit  team (hugely important for us as we have the team split between Madrid and San Francisco) and externally as we thrive to forge and maintain honest and lasting relationships with our clients.

Along with the powerful meaning and purpose of the term Karumi itself, our company fully embraces two basic principles as stated in our already worldwide known claim “All things digital with rock solid code”:

I- All things digital -  Karumi is formed by a team of four founding engineers, developers, thinkers, problem solvers and over all, technologists with a variety of complementary skills and interests and a fine geek sense of humor. Our well rounded development team is entirely formed by full stack computer programmers, aka the all-singing, all-dancing technical wizards. Full stack means the ability to  look across the entire stack of technologies to develop great usable, solid, scalable web applications:

• Creative brain which is able to create digital experiences (front-end), skilled in HTML5, CSS3, Javascript. Also in the mobile era we live in, we dominate Android, iOS, Windows Phone and mobile web.
• And a logical one (back-end), with Python, PHP and Node capabilities.
• Crazy propensity for detail with skills in database technologies like MySQL, NoSQL.

In Karumi there is no such thing as comfort zone. Such versatility allow us to build strong, long-lasting relationships with our clients, ranging from small creative teams to global organizations. We really enjoy working with individuals and businesses of all sizes to bring new ideas to life through awesome software solutions of stunning design. We also fix broken experiences and legacy tech infrastructure chaos by assisting companies in rebuilding their systems while they pursue the digital deep dive. As a matter of fact, at the moment we are working actively with large corporations in traditional industries such as banking or insurance, building amazing apps as part of their strategy for digital business transformation.

To be more precise, these are the mainstream services we are asked for:

• Karumi  Studio - Software development with focus on web apps and mobile apps . We like challenging and complex projects , the more ambitious and complex, the better!

• Karumi Consulting - Systems analysis and development of recommendations to address legacy situations, modernization of architecture and performance analysis.

• Karumi Campus  -  Our side project to share everything we’ve learned over the years in the business of software engineering. We will be launching a series of dev courses real soon, stay tuned!

II. Rock solid code -  In the software development business, the quality of work is fundamentally measured on the quality of the code you write. The foundation for quality code is in the overall design of the software solution mean to tackle an identified “pain” or business need.

We are passionate about helping our clients reach their goals by means of software apps and platforms that increase their productivity, client relationship, brand recognition and overall happiness. Karumi’s coders are knowledgeable solution architects able to asses the optimal design for a software solution according to the specific needs and operational scheme of each client, building scalable and stable solutions that are meant to last.

How many times have you recursively used a tool at your workplace that crashes all the time? Wouldn’t you be much happier and productive with a sleek tool that becomes your ally and makes your work a piece of cake? We all have been there (OMG, now I am recalling the awful buggy expense report tool I had to fight against with after every business trip in my last corporate job!). We believe technology is meant to empower people and enhance human development. Besides, life is too short to deal with cranky sites and getting frustrated in front of a screen.

All above mentioned is what makes Karumi tick. We embark on every project with a commitment to create something elegant, enduring and effective. That is our heartbeat. Our approach is uniquely simple and honest, we are a small dedicated software studio, delivering outstanding work.

If you like what we do, and think we could work together, then get in touch! Please drop us a line to hello@gokarumi.com. Rumor has it our average response time is under 1 hour!

Disclaimer: we love to connect with clients all over the globe, maintaining a smooth relationship via video conf-call. It’s 2014, remote collaboration and flexible joint-creation is the way to go.

We hope to see you around for the many entries to come… long life to the Karumi blog!

- Irene, on behalf of all Karumies.