Why Akal?

Akal is a London based but fully remote digital agency specialising in developing cloud, web & mobile solutions for charities, foundations, social good, sustainable organisations, education institutions & tech for good companies, helping make the world a better place.

Founded by our CTO Jasdeep Khalsa, we’re a tiny team who collectively has 20 years of experience delivering software projects successfully.

Our core values

These are the values we actively try to live by, not just something we’ve written down as a paper exercise:

Doing Good - Working with organisations & projects doing good in the world
Sustainability - Limiting our impact socially & to the environment
Transparency - Being open with our partners regarding financial and non-financial concerns at every stage

Ethical Policy

As a digital agency we will not work with any companies or projects that condone, encourage or invest in any of the following:

Gambling
Drugs (including alcohol & e/cigarettes)
Adult content
Fraud (in any form)
The production of weapons or technologies used within weapons directly or indirectly
War (either directly or indirectly)
Bringing harm to people, the environment or biodiversity

Green Policy

As a company we strive to minimize our environmental impact with the following initiatives, and seek partners and suppliers that follow this same vision:

Only consuming energy from 100% renewable sources in order to power our offices
Only hosting our applications in data-centers which use 100% renewable energy sources and are carbon neutral / net zero
Encouraging our employees to work from home, cycle to work or use public transport wherever possible
Ensuring the products we use in the office are certified as being from sustainable sources e.g. paper is certified under the Rainforest Alliance and any confectionary or tea is Fairtrade
Promoting vegetarianism in the workplace as a way to reduce our impact on the environment and reduce animal suffering

Open Source Policy

We will publicly open source whatever code we can, whilst remaining sensitive to legitimate organisational concerns
Open sourcing our code helps other organisations benefit from the work we have done to help create more impact
Open sourcing our code helps improve security, re-usability, code quality, documentation and maintainability of the software we build
It’s our duty to give back something to the open source community, projects and tooling upon which our work is based
All source code would be released under The Good License (created by Akal Software) or MIT license, or another open source or public good license as deemed appropriate to the project
Organisations benefit from receiving FREE updates to packages maintained by us for life

For those of you who are tech gurus, we try to develop all our projects on a fully open stack:

JavaScript - TypeScript/Babel & the best framework for the job: React.js, Vue.js, Redux, Ionic
HTML - via templating languages e.g. Markdown, JSX, Handlebars
CSS - via preprocessor languages & plugins eg. Less, SCSS, PostCSS
Microservices Backend / Middleware - RESTful or GraphQL API via Node.js (preferred), Go, Python, PHP
Databases & Queuing - SQL (Postgres, SQLite) or NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis)
DevOps & Automation - Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible
Testing - Jest, Mocha, Cypress
Design - storybook.js, Bulma, Material UI

We are able to work with other open technologies. If in doubt, please get in touch.

Please note: if you already have a proprietary database e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, IBM Db2 we can integrate with these via GraphQL or RESTful microservices using an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and/or a RESTful middlelayer