Anomaly, as our brand name alludes to, has always been a software engineering that deeply understands the technologies that we work with. Our ability to start over again andadapt to the changing face of digital technology is exactly how we stay ahead of the game.

When our rather small team started building enormous web applications, we looked to what industry leaders were building upon. In the early part of the last decade, we identified a gap - developers were either misunderstanding or not building REST APIs properly. With our approach towards simplicity and purity, we built a framework that allowed a small team to build REST APIs with scalability. This framework allowed us to build our entire business and deliver major platforms for companies across many walks of life.

Our plan was to build technology that gave us the advantage to build products for customers, then use that technology to build products that set us on a path of being a product-based business. Drawing on our domain knowledge we identified productivity, gaming technologies and payments as key focus areas.

We built a rather novel productivity SaaS platform on top of Google Cloud Platform, a game using Unity, while spending a tremendous amount of time understanding Stripe so we could accept payments for SaaS business. Due to a few unexpected disruptions we decided to not ship our SaaS - that’s a story for a different time entirely. We did however come to the realisation that in order to weather disruptions, we could not reliably ship SaaS platforms without being partners with an infrastructure company. We also could not build them without a payment company, so it became clear that in order to keep building our consulting business we had to be part of something bigger.

Linode - our abode in the clouds

In the early days of Linux virtualisation, Anomaly had its own line of virtualised hosting to cover the gap in the market. With the rise of Linode we found ourselves deploying more workloads on their infrastructure where location wasn’t an issue. Their support was absolutely phenomenal.

With the rise of services like Amazon Web Services, hosting was no longer a viable business for us, so we decided to fold our hosting offering down. Having now deployed several large production workloads on AWS and GCP for our customers, it felt like being in the Wild West - where you had access to these resources but no one to talk to if things went wrong.

Linode had been gearing up their offerings and had introduced support for Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform amongst many other things.

We reached out to our friends of fifteen years and together discussed where Anomaly was headed. Whilst Linode had grown, they had retained their soul and you could still access managed services for your infrastructure as well as speak to a real person when human intervention was desired.

Anomaly is a proud Linode partner. With their Linode data centre now active, we deploy nearly all of our production workloads on their infrastructure.

Stripe - growing the Internet economy

We have worked with Stripe’s technology since as early as 2013. They are our go-to platform for accepting payments on the products we build for ourselves, and would recommend them as the de-facto provider to our customers.

When we got involved, Stripe were in their early days of developing an expert services program, and we put our hand up to carry their vision forward in Oceania.

We shook hands with Stripe and started working with customers in late 2019.

Our team has never looked back. We’ve had the pleasure of working with ASX listed companies through to startups, leveraging what Stripe has to offer to enhance their platforms.

We continue to pursue our SaaS ideas, which Stripe is a core part of.

AgriPark - our new home

Our current home had become uninspiring. Large businesses had moved away from the area, leaving us somewhat on our own. We had to head out to find a new home.

Little did we know that AgriPark - Charles Sturt University’s long-held vision and commitment to support, facilitate and grow the nation's agricultural sector - was scaling up rapidly. We were excited to learn about the wide variety of businesses that resided there and the opportunity for collaboration was exactly what we were looking for.

Charles Sturt University has been Anomaly's major customer for several years. It made sense for us to join forces with AgriPark and offer our expertise to their partner organisations.

January 2020 saw us move into Building 474 on the Charles Sturt University Wagga Wagga campus — which Anomaly now calls home. We are proudly committed to working with the partners and contributing to the educational ecosystem.

I was honoured to be invited to join Charles Sturt University as an adjunct, which I gratefully accepted. I look forward to being able to contribute my experiences as a software engineer and a business person.

Begin. Again.

I have been a fan of Sam Harris for a number of years, and am an avid user of the Waking Up app. One of the lessons introduces a concept called “Begin. Again.” - a technique where when you find yourself mentally stuck, you simply step away and just Begin, Again.

We brought our focus on what we do best, write great software and depend on our partners to help us deliver great solutions.

COVID-19 brought unimaginable disruptions around the world. These extraordinarily strange times have amplified the need for online infrastructure, payments and radically different ways of collaborating. Our minds are racing towards building solutions for this brave new world.

With our new found partnerships, we are ready to Begin. Again.