xSeriCon

Here's how Peter Clarke, Managing Director of xSeriCon, describes Reflex after more than a year of building with it:

Meet xSeriCon, a safety consultancy working in the chemical industry. xSeriCon does risk analysis for the companies that design and build chemical factories, including major engineering firms, as well as end users across oil and gas, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies. Any time one of those companies builds something new or modifies a facility, they need a series of risk assessments to identify every accident that could happen and make sure enough protection is built in to keep that risk under control.

Those assessments, including HAZOP, LOPA, and alarm rationalization studies, are where xSeriCon's product comes in. The team is building Vizop, a Reflex app that helps clients gather, manage, and present the colossal amount of data a safety study generates.

A single risk study can run for days or even weeks, with 10 to 20 highly paid engineers working through a facility section by section. The data they produce is not neat sensor readings. It is human-generated, narrative-type information that does not fit into convenient patterns or molds, which is exactly what makes the work so labor-intensive.

The established tools in the market did not help. Competing apps are desktop-bound, dated, and hard to learn. Peter set a different bar for Vizop: an engineer should be able to type in a URL and start working.

Vizop is the third generation of the app, and the story of the first two explains why xSeriCon values Reflex so highly.

The first generation was a standalone desktop app: Python backend, Python frontend, built on the wxPython windowing library. It worked, but the library was legacy, and xSeriCon wanted Vizop to be an online, multi-user app. That was going to be very difficult as a pure desktop program.

So the team switched to Django, and spent six months regretting it.

The deeper problem was structural. xSeriCon hired a frontend developer to build the Django UI, and the two halves of the app never came together.

The end result was several tens of thousands of dollars of code that never even ran. With Reflex, that failure mode does not get managed better. It disappears entirely: there is no handoff between a backend developer and a frontend developer, because the same engineer writes both ends in the same language.

When Peter went looking for the next option, a search turned up four candidates. One stood out.

Choosing it was not a casual decision. Vizop is xSeriCon's commercial product, and the team was betting it on a framework that had only just appeared.

More than a year later, the bet has paid off. xSeriCon came on board around Reflex version 0.3 and has been building with it ever since. Peter, who describes himself as old school and coded roughly half the app himself, works alongside Paul, a full-time developer who works with Reflex every day. The entire app is hand-written Python, with no AI coding tools involved, or as Peter puts it, "RI: real intelligence instead of AI."

Vizop gives xSeriCon's clients two ways to run a study. The first replicates the traditional worksheet: a spreadsheet-style interface with boxes to type in and tools to move, copy, and link items together. That familiarity matters, because it is what risk engineers have used for decades.

The second is the part Peter calls groundbreaking: engineers can work directly on the engineering drawing itself.

In Vizop today, an engineer can open a piping and instrumentation diagram, such as an LNG ship unloading facility, click on a symbol, and tell the app what it is. Once Vizop knows a component is a pressure sensor, a built-in database tells it how that component can fail and what safety protection it can provide, such as raising an alarm.

The app shipped recently and is in production use in-house, with the first external client studies ahead of it.

• Everything in Python, front end and back end. After the Django experience, a single language across the whole app was the deciding factor for a Python-native team.
• A box of tools, not a straitjacket. Django insisted on its own patterns, like username-and-password account flows that xSeriCon's licensing model did not need. Reflex let them build the app their way.

• Documentation good enough to live in. Getting started was easy, and the docs remain part of the daily workflow more than a year in.

• Depth beyond the docs, thanks to React. Reflex sits on top of React, so when the team needs more than the built-in components, the ceiling is far higher than the documented surface.

• Powerful and extensible, with room to grow. The team knew early Reflex was missing things they wanted, but the pace of releases gave them confidence those gaps would close, and in many cases they have.

Vizop's pitch to clients is time. xSeriCon estimates the app's efficiency can shave at least 10% off workshop time, and in this industry that compounds fast.

The roadmap pushes the same advantage further:

1. Click-and-drag node highlighting, so engineers can mark up sections of a drawing inside Vizop instead of annotating PDFs in a separate app
2. Automatic recognition of the standard symbols on engineering drawings
3. Intelligent suggestions that pre-populate the safety worksheet based on what the drawing already shows

Today, engineers still mark up node highlights in Adobe Acrobat and switch back to their study tool. Pulling that workflow inside Vizop is the kind of consolidation the whole product is built around.

What started as a desktop tool that only xSeriCon could run is now an online, multi-user product their clients can simply open in a browser.