About STRICH

Why I built STRICH

I've been writing software for more than 20 years: as a full-time employee, freelancer and as the owner of Classy Code, a boutique software development agency. I scaled back to focus on what I love most, building software, and founded Pixelverse in 2022, the umbrella company for all my current ventures.

During my agency years I wrote 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. That was when I saw a gap and decided to build my own barcode scanning SDK, in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

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 why I decided to build STRICH for the web.

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".

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 Graveyward.

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.
• User Experience - Make scanning with STRICH delightful for end users.
• Platform Integration - Integration into web apps should be as easy and seamless as possible.
• Symbology Support - All major symbologies are supported, but there are always more, and some things like Extended Character Interpretation are still missing.

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