Embedded, not adjacent
We sit alongside the client's engineers, share the same tools, and participate in the same rituals.
About the studio
A small company
with a long view.
Nice & Simple GmbH is an independent IT company. We work with a small number of clients at any time, and we do so with the intention of staying useful to them for a long time.
Who we are, in one paragraph.
We are software engineers, cloud practitioners, and technology consultants organised as a single studio. We design and build custom software, help teams modernise systems that have outgrown themselves, and support the operational practices required to keep those systems dependable.
We take on work we believe we can execute well and decline the rest. This is the single most important decision we make each year.
Our mission
To build software that its owners can still explain, five years from now, to the people who inherit it.
Most of the technology we build will be maintained by someone other than the engineers who first wrote it. That fact quietly shapes every decision we make.
What we value
Values only matter when they inform decisions. These do.
- Clarity
- We prefer plain language, plain code, and plain conversations. Sophistication reveals itself in the choices, not the vocabulary.
- Craft
- Small details compound. The margin between a good system and a durable one lives inside them.
- Candour
- We would rather deliver an uncomfortable observation early than a comfortable one late.
- Restraint
- We ship the smallest change that solves the problem. Then we look again.
- Continuity
- The engineer who begins the work is the engineer who finishes it.
- Curiosity
- We take the time to understand each client's domain because software written from the outside is rarely right.
Working philosophy
Slow enough to think, fast enough to matter.
We work in short cycles with visible artefacts, and we resist the temptation to declare progress before there is something to look at.
We estimate honestly, communicate blockers as they appear, and prefer written decisions over meetings that could have been an email.
We treat our clients' time as we would like ours to be treated.
Approach to technology
We choose technology the way we would choose materials for a building — for how it behaves under stress, how it ages, and how easily the next person can work with it.
A stack is a tool, not an identity. We are comfortable across languages, cloud providers, and paradigms, and we do not push a preferred one into projects where it does not belong.
When we recommend a new technology, we do so because it removes a real risk or opens a real capability. When we recommend leaving one in place, it is for the same reason.
Quality standards
The line we hold.
- ·Every non-trivial change is reviewed by a second engineer before it ships.
- ·Automated tests protect the behaviours the client depends on, not the ones easy to test.
- ·Deployments are boring: repeatable, reversible, observable.
- ·Secrets, credentials, and data are handled with intent from the first commit.
- ·We document decisions as we make them, so we don't have to reconstruct them later.
- ·Systems we hand off include the operational context required to run them.
How we collaborate with client teams.
Ownership stays with the client
We build systems that our clients understand. Vendor lock-in is a form of failure we take seriously.
Communication is written
Decisions, trade-offs, and reasoning are captured in text so they outlive the conversation.
Small, senior teams
Two to four engineers is usually the right size. We resist scaling teams beyond what the problem needs.
Long-term vision
To remain a studio that people are glad to have hired, years after the engagement ended.
We measure ourselves by the systems that outlive our involvement — the ones the client's team is still comfortable maintaining, extending, and explaining, long after we have moved on.
Get in touch
Email is the fastest way to reach the team. A short description of the problem is enough to start a useful conversation.
- Company
- Nice & Simple GmbH
- Website
- niceandsimplegroup.com
- lauraschmidt10120w@gmail.com