The One Development Kit · since 2011

Launch business applications in a fraction of the time.

d1kit is an all-in-one application development and e-learning ecosystem. Financial accounting, inventory, approval workflow and integration come ready-made, so delivery teams build only what is genuinely specific to the organisation - cutting development time by more than half.

Learn · Build · Earn - free classes take you from the fundamentals to project work.

  • 50%+ Reduction in development time
  • 21 Applications developed
  • 4 Supported programming languages
  • 2011 In continuous development since
The problem

Why business software takes so long to deliver

01

Projects run over time and over budget

Software projects routinely exceed their duration and their budget, because business needs keep evolving while the build is under way. Around 85% run over schedule, and a typical custom build takes four to twelve months to reach production.

02

The same foundations are rebuilt every time

Most of that time is not spent on what makes an organisation distinctive. It goes into records and forms, listings and filters, approvals, permissions, reporting and audit trails - the same operational backbone, written again.

03

Skilled people are not being brought through

Capable graduates are unemployed while teams struggle to find developers who can deliver. The gap is not talent; it is a route from learning to production work.

The solution

Standardise the repeatable part

In 1948 a single restaurant reorganised how food was prepared, and turned a slow, variable process into a fast and consistent one. It did not do so by serving less - it did so by standardising everything that did not need to be different every time.

d1kit applies that idea to business software. The operational backbone every organisation needs is provided as configured capability rather than commissioned work. What remains is the part that actually distinguishes the organisation, and that is where the delivery effort goes.

The result: high-performance web and mobile applications, delivered in less than half the time - without the result being generic.

  1. 2011

    Development commences as a way to cut the repeated work out of web projects

  2. 2012

    First version - a form generator - powers a live eCommerce platform

  3. 2013

    First major deployment: a budget reconciliation tool in the oil and gas sector

  4. 2016

    Adopted as the platform behind a health records system

  5. 2017

    A regulator’s workflow processing system rebuilt on the platform in two months

  6. 2019

    Underpins social protection data collection at national scale

  7. 2020

    Institutional adoption as a standard development tool

  8. 2022

    Java implementation commences alongside the original

Integration

Fits the estate you already run

A deployment is expected to exchange data with what an organisation already operates. Three interfaces cover the ways that is normally done.

Integration credentials are issued per deployment by the organisation that operates it, with their own permissions, expiry and rate limits.

Learn · build · earn

Provide people with the tools and skills needed for today's jobs.

d1kit is an e-learning ecosystem as much as a platform. We publish what a working developer needs to know, teach it for free, and take interns through to paid delivery work.

Open since 2017

The learning guide

On 4 August 2017 we published a plain list of what a developer actually needs to be knowledgeable in - infrastructure, hosting, technologies, development process, business prospecting - as a publicly accessible document, and shared it with anyone who asked where to start. It is still open, and still maintained.

Read the guide →
  1. 1
    Start - Learn the ground

    Work through the foundations and the first three areas of this guide. Free online classes cover the same ground with someone to ask. No approval, no cost, no commitment.

  2. 2
    Intern - Build your skills and gain experience

    Join as an intern and work on structured exercises with review from an experienced developer. This is where the development-process area stops being theory - you write the specification, the tests and the bug reports for real.

  3. 3
    Intermediate - Work on real projects with our teams

    Contribute to systems that are actually in use, alongside people who maintain them. You get code review, and you get to see how a delivered system behaves after handover - the part most training never shows.

  4. 4
    Advanced - Receive contract offers and start earning

    Members who reach this stage join project teams as consultants and take paid delivery work. The business prospecting area of the guide is what makes this stage possible rather than accidental.