Programming

Firefly’s programming practice is led by senior engineers who solve complex application problems — from custom database systems to advanced third-party integrations. Since 2004 we have built data-centric software for organizations such as the Maine State Legislature, IDEXX Laboratories, Mook Sea Farm, and Hammond Lumber.

Where many shops begin with a visual template and bolt logic on later, Firefly takes a data-first approach: we model the information that will outlive any particular design, then craft application architecture around it. That discipline yields systems that remain maintainable as brands, devices, and even languages change.

Application architecture & core programming

Our team writes production software in PHP 8, Python (Django, FastAPI, NumPy, Pandas, Polars), and Node.js, with frameworks including Laravel and Symfony. We design for a “shared nothing” request model so systems can scale out cleanly when traffic or datasets grow.

Security is built in from the start: PDO-based database access to prevent SQL injection, whitelist validation on every form field, encrypted tokens against cross-site request forgery, and AES-256 options for sensitive data. We containerize with Docker when projects need reproducible environments, and deploy to AWS (EC2, Aurora, SQS, Lambda, Fargate) as well as Firefly’s own infrastructure.

Custom CMS & open-source foundations

Backed by years of development, Firefly’s Apollo content-management framework turns normalized relational databases into tailored editing experiences — WYSIWYG where it helps, buttons for the workflows your staff actually use, and clean separation of content from presentation so data can feed exports and web services later.

To discuss a programming project, contact us.