Berlin · engineering studio
We build careful tools
for sober software.
A small team that takes contracts when the problem is interesting and the people are kind. No retainers. No dashboards. No notifications that aren't worth reading.
Networking
Wireshark-friendly designs, p99 budgets we actually hit, and protocol choices that age well.
Backend systems
Boring stacks chosen on purpose. Postgres, NATS, Go, Python. We don't introduce Kubernetes to fix a cron job.
Developer experience
If the build takes more than two minutes, we shorten it before we ship anything new on top.
Recent notes
2026 · 05 · 14
Quiet networking
The kindest thing a piece of network software can do for an operator is not have an opinion about it.
2026 · 04 · 02
TLS everywhere is fine, but it's not the point
What changes when the connection is private isn't the connection. It's everything that gets to live next to it.
2026 · 02 · 19
On keeping software intentionally small
Three years in, the codebase is half what it used to be. Here's how that happened, and why we'd do it again.
"We hired Nightfox to debug a slow request-handling layer. They came back two weeks later with the bug, a fix, and a note explaining a second bug we hadn't asked about. Both were real. We kept them on."— L. Karras, CTO, Maple & Garner