Custom software development from Hamburg.

Most problems are solved better and more cheaply by off-the-shelf software than I could manage. Rebuilding an ERP system because the one you bought is awkward in two places is an expensive mistake — so every conversation starts with whether anything needs building at all.

Custom work is worth it where your process genuinely differs from everyone else's: usually exactly where your money is made, or in the gap between two systems that someone bridges by copying and pasting.

The focus is software that runs internally: rarely beautiful, but in use every day.

• Web applications, internal tools and portals
• APIs and interfaces between the systems you run
• Architecture consulting, code reviews, second opinions
• Modernising what exists instead of rebuilding it expensively
• Tests, documentation and a deployment you operate yourself

A system that has run for ten years has spent ten years learning edge cases that appear in no requirements document, and a rewrite rediscovers them one at a time, in production. So I look first at what actually hurts — usually not the core but the edges: an outdated library, missing tests, a deployment only one person can perform. That can be straightened out in stages.

If a rewrite really is the right answer, I say so with reasons — and with a path that does not stand you still for two years.

Every one to two weeks there is something finished to try: the sooner you can use something, the sooner it shows that we understood a requirement differently.

Automated tests around the parts that hurt when they break, deployments at the push of a button, documentation from day one — the same practice as in large-company engineering, just finished faster.

The code is yours, with documentation and a handover that lets your team or another contractor genuinely pick the work up. That is the goal: that you can run the thing without me. Depending on your developer is a risk for you, and not a business I would enjoy.