We Are Sysarch is a consulting firm specializing in Perl, Unix and Internet projects. The name stands for SYStems ARCHitecture and it reflects my philosophy about software engineering. This style of development may take longer to produce a finished product but it will create a stronger and more unified architecture which will leads to easier modifications and lower costs of ownership over the life of the system. Many of my past projects have had major improvements done months after they were released that took very little work to integrate due to the effort put into the initial design phase. Think of it as a having strong skeleton upon which you hang the software muscles.
Most programs written on the fly without a proper design have the backbone of a slug.
For a good and very public example of this design philosophy, check out Northern Light , the search engine with consistantly one of the largest indexes of the web. Gulliver is capable of fetching over 2000 pages in parallel, saving them to disk in an indexable form and parsing out links to other pages. It also keeps track of which sites and pages it has crawled so it won't visit a page again too soon, while still being able to schedule its next visit. Fetching a page on the web, saving and parsing it is not difficult. You can do that with just a few lines of Perl and some popular modules.