Services
Michell Computing is a consultancy. The usual engagement is to design and build a system, then stay close enough to keep it honest as the work around it changes.
Bespoke software
Most of the practice’s history is writing software that does not exist off the shelf: field recorders, mapping viewers, coordinate tools, and the office systems that sit behind them. A typical project is a desktop application with a long working life, often required to run without a permanent network connection.
Recent work has been built with Free Pascal and Lazarus so the same source can target Windows, Linux and macOS. Older systems were written in Delphi, Visual Basic, Access and ArcGIS VBA; those code bases are still supported where they remain in use.
Databases
Database work ranges from a single-user Access application to a shared PostgreSQL or SQL Server store. That includes schema design, data migration, spatial extensions, and the dull but necessary jobs of backup, restore and query hygiene.
Several long-running client systems began in Access or SQL Server and were later moved onto a central server. The interesting part is rarely the move itself; it is keeping the meaning of the data intact while the organisation’s procedures change around it.
Geographic information systems
GIS is a thread through most of the larger projects: capturing observations in the field, transforming coordinates between national and global systems, and presenting results to people who are not GIS specialists.
That has meant ESRI and MapInfo work in earlier years, and more recently QGIS, PostGIS, and mapping code written in-house. Grid InQuest II is the most public example of the last of those.
Advice and support
Not every job needs a new program. Sometimes the useful thing is a clear opinion on a geodatabase, a transformation, or whether an open source stack will actually do what has been promised. Support for systems we have already built is available on the same basis.
Working with us
There is no sales ladder and no account team. You speak to the person who will do the work. If the problem looks like a fit, we will say how we would approach it and what that is likely to cost. If it does not, we will say that too.