The challenge
Twelve years ago, Hinkley — the lighting company — was weeks from releasing an iPad application for its distributors nationwide when the developer building it simply vanished. The original firm had shut down: the owner decided to retire and move to Europe. A lovely plan — the retirement to Europe, less so the shutting down — and poorly timed for everyone counting on the app.
Hinkley was left holding a soon-to-ship product, a fixed deadline, and an unfamiliar codebase, with no certainty the custom code could even be finished.
What we did
We took over development and maintenance of the app. Where the existing code was headed in the right direction, we finished it. Where it wasn’t — where the previous team had hand-rolled custom functionality — we refactored it onto the comparable capabilities Apple already shipped in iOS, trading fragile, bespoke code for the platform’s own, better-supported building blocks. Less code to own. Fewer things to break.
The outcome
We shipped the application to Hinkley’s distributors in time for their annual industry gathering in Dallas — the deadline that actually mattered.
Twelve years later, it’s still in production — and it has never been frozen in time. Beyond the routine updates that keep pace with Apple’s SDK changes, a steady stream of new features from Hinkley’s marketing team has continued to drop cleanly into the same architecture we laid down at the start.
More recently, we moved the application’s backend off an on-premise SQL Server to AWS’s managed SQL Server service — data synchronization is noticeably faster for distributors in the field, and database maintenance is far simpler for the DevOps team. A clean infrastructure upgrade the stable architecture made easy.
A nearly abandoned project became a durable asset — which is the real test of a rescue: not just shipping it, but building a foundation that still holds a decade on.