Engineering close to reality.
Specifications rarely describe an organisation perfectly. The real process lives in spreadsheets, habits and the way one person always does a task. I use the term forward deployed engineering for a way of working, not for a job title I have held.
The cycle I follow is Observe, Understand, Model, Build, Deploy, Measure, Improve. It repeats; the first deployment is the beginning of the feedback, not the end of the project.
Observe and understand
Before modelling anything I want to see the work being done: how a store keeper records a delivery, which register a pharmacist trusts, what a waiter does when the printer jams. The words people use for things become the names in the data model. KinetiRx has a due-khata and OrderRestro has stations because that is what those businesses call them.
Model and build
The model is the part that survives. A construction material workflow is requisition, order, receipt, inventory and consumption, with separate delivered, accepted and rejected quantities. Once that is right, screens are comparatively easy to change.
Deployment constraints are requirements
Many of the places my software runs have no reliable internet, an old Windows machine, or nobody who administers servers. That is why OrderRestro runs on the restaurant's own network, why NodeDR POS ships as a native installer, and why KinetiRx can be installed from a CasaOS app store. Those were requirements discovered by looking at where the software had to live.
Legacy systems, migration and integration
Real customers arrive with data in spreadsheets and old tools. Zulivio imports and exports CSV and Google Sheets because that is where the data already is. Rechvix has an XLSX import path. I plan migration as part of the product, not as a one-off script.
Training, feedback and iteration
A user manual is part of delivery. Rechvix and OrderRestro ship with manuals, and the construction ERP includes a printable end-user manual. After deployment I read what actually happens in production and change the software accordingly. A recent example is team-member accounts in Rechvix, added because the first release could only ever create one login.
What I am not claiming
I have not worked at a company that uses this title, and I am not describing any employer's programme. This page describes how I approach projects.