👋 Hi, I'm Alex and I'm the founder and developer of STRICH.
Why I built STRICH
I've been writing software for more than 20 years: as a full-time employee at AdNovum Informatik AG and Noser Engineering AG, as a freelancer under my own name, and as the owner of Classy Code GmbH, a small full-stack development agency. After COVID, I scaled back to focus on what I love most, building software. I founded Pixelverse in 2022 as the umbrella company for all my products. I wrote about that experience in 2022 if you're curious.
During my agency years, among many other things, I wrote some apps for customers that required barcode scanning. I tried both commercial solutions with license costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and OSS libraries which needed a lot of DIY work and were unmaintained.
Another frustration of mine was that most of my customers believed they needed a native app, when a web app would have been perfectly fine and much easier to maintain.
That's when I decided to build my own barcode scanning SDK and make it native to web apps.
Product philosophy
My goal for STRICH is to be the best SDK for in-browser barcode scanning:
- It's lightweight, easy to use and works well for the vast majority of use cases and runs on a wide range of devices.
- Development is focused on achieving that goal, and not chasing shiny new things.
- Quality is important: STRICH powers business processes every release is tested extensively, both using automated and manual tests.
- The API is stable. Breaking changes are avoided, unless there is no other way.
- Smart defaults instead of maximum configurability, it should "just work".
I strongly relate to the UNIX philosophy of single purpose tooling.
The philosophy could be summarized as: do one thing, and do it well.
Bootstrapped, fully owned
STRICH is bootstrapped, independent and profitable. It's fully owned and operated by me. Sometimes people are surprised that a single person can build a product and operate a business on their own and ask questions like "what happens when you are gone?". All I can say to that is that I am fully committed to STRICH, love working on it and am financially dependent on the income it generates.
Maybe I will eventually hire other people to work on STRICH, but for now it's mostly me working on the product, with some support from my accountant, my legal counsel, and my administrative assistant. I intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. If you see that as a risk, you might be better served by an alternative, of which there are several. Keep in mind that just because a company is big doesn't guarantee its product will always be around, just take a stroll through the Google Graveyard.
Future development
STRICH is a mature product that is actively maintained and supported. However, I am also actively developing it, mainly in the following areas:
Performance
Make the scanning fast and battery-efficient, incorporating new browser technologies as they become available.
User Experience
I want to make the mundane task of scanning barcodes as delightful as possible.
Platform Integration
Integration into web apps should be as easy and seamless as possible. Browser standards that facilitate that are monitored and eventually incorporated when they become widely available.
Coverage
All major barcode symbologies are supported, but there are always more, and some things are still missing. Development is strongly driven by customer requirements, so if you want to see something added, get in touch!
I do not plan to port STRICH to other platforms as I believe in a strong, independent and capable web platform.
Thank you for reading this! ❤️
- Alex (barcode nerd)