Associative Trails

We develop bespoke web and mobile applications

Associative Trails is a boutique internet consultancy based on the high-speed rail link in East Kent, UK. We take pride in crafting web and mobile applications that save time and make money for our clients.

Our small size makes us great value for money. Please get in touch to arrange a free, no obligation consultation to discuss your requirements.

Services

  • Dynamic server-side programming
    Python, Django, Coldfusion, custom intranets, bespoke content management systems
  • Databases
    SQL Server, MySQL, PostreSQL
  • API integration
    Hubspot, Creditsafe, YouTube, Vimeo, Egnyte, OpenAsset, Slack, Twitter
  • Quality front-end coding
    HTML, CSS, Javascript, responsive design, Outlook add-ins, D3 data visualisation
  • Mobile applications
    HTML5, Apple iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android
  • Hosting and deployment
    Linux, Windows, AWS EC2/S3/Cloudfront, Azure VM, Apache, IIS, Nginx, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, Azure functions, Docker, Jekyll, Prometheus

Selected projects

Sling
Wonderfully easy workflows

A flexible and innovative workflow building tool enabling companies to set up and administer approval workflows for business development, procurement, and all sorts of other key processes.

Eckersley O'Callaghan Intranet
Invaluable technical information

A self-populating technical library that grew into a comprehensive company-wide information portal for one of the UK's most accomplished engineering specialists.

Old Arupians Community Website (2019)
Freshening community fellowship

A thorough refresh of one of our most venerable and successful projects. Now fully responsive and even easier to use.

Heatherwick Studio Intranet
Digging that studio scene

A bespoke company intranet for one of the UK's top design studios.

Selected clients

  • Arup
  • Ashridge Business School
  • Eckersley O'Callaghan
  • Ellipse
  • Heatherwick Studio
  • London Business School
  • Safetime
  • Scott Brownrigg
  • Sheppard Robson

Elsewhere

Recent blog posts

Something Worth Manipulating
Notes from colleagues about the client contact
The notes were always worth keeping. Now there's something that can actually use them.

When Andrej Karpathy published his notes-to-wiki experiment, it crystallised something I'd been building toward for months. This post is about migrating a messy collection of notes into a plain markdown structure - and what happens when you hand an LLM the keys.

The agreement incentive
Notes from colleagues about the client contact
AI is your most capable thinking partner - and your least honest one.

AI tools are trained to agree with you, and vendors have incentives to keep it that way. The agreeable persona is baked in at the training level and prompting around it only helps at the margins. For solo practitioners with no team to push back, this is a structural risk. The fix isn't using AI less, it's building friction into your workflow by design.

Human in the loop
Notes from colleagues about the client contact
The machine writes the code, the human takes the blame. Welcome to the Reverse Centaur.

Successful AI-assisted work depends on a genuine division of labour between human judgment and machine capability. What's actually emerging is something different - humans absorbing liability for machine decisions, at scale, while the companies selling the tools express concern that you aren't using them enough.

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