Plasmic Peach

At long last, there’s a good, free geocoding service for the UK. Finding coordinates based on post code and/or address data has long been a free service in many countries. But in the UK, the Royal Mail’s control of post code data – coupled with the ever-changing nature of that data – has meant geocoding has been difficult or expensive. Services like Postcode Anywhere and iShareMaps have provided equivalents to Google’s geocoder, but for a fee. That changed in early July 2007, when Google released geocoding for the UK.

Lots of web developers use PHP. It’s an open source programming language and one of the most popular for making web sites. We don’t use it, though. We use Ruby.

This is not an arbitrary choice, like preferring purple to green. We use Ruby because it’s better. That’s what we tell our clients when they ask why we use Ruby. The next question is usually, “What makes it better?”

Even though one fairly well-known programmer has already pointed out the similarities between programming and art, most people, I would say, still do not appreciate how similar they are.

One thing that struck me recently is how good programmers and good drawers approach their work – and how they differ from the inexperienced. In both fields, people who are skilled know where to begin.

It’s a general principle that small teams are more efficient than big ones.Teams with the minimum number of people to cover requirements are agile and can get good ideas realised faster.

This is true for software development as well as for other industries. But in software, there’s another reason why small companies compete well: they can choose better tools.

Michal read about a place called The Hub a while ago in a friend’s blog. It was a place where creatives, non-profits, and startups shared office space in central London.

We thought it sounded perfect for Momo, so we checked it out. We liked it, and we joined, and we now use it as our office.

Momo Web are pleased to launch their new blog. We’re web developers working with clients in London to efficiently create sophisticated web sites and applications. We, the founders, have been web developers for some time, and both of us started programming computers as kids.

We share a vision of how web development can be done better and more efficiently than in the past, and that’s why we set up Momo. By engaging closely with our clients and our users during development, we solve real needs and avoid overcomplication. We use Ruby on Rails, a cutting-edge development platform, for all our new projects.

We’re working with a variety of interesting clients. We’ll post updates to this blog so you can read about how our projects are going. We will also post articles relating web development, open source software, business, and other things we find interesting. Enjoy!