Sibiu, Romania · since 2016

Building awesome code, line by line.

A small studio in Sibiu. Mostly web: sites and the software behind them, from the first sketch to the server it runs on. That includes the parts nobody quotes for, like the mail that has to arrive and the certificate that expires on a Sunday.

PHPLaravelMySQLJavaScript NodeAndroidKotlinRaspberry Pi Cloudflare WorkersApache

What we do

Four things, done properly.

You talk to the person who writes the code. Nothing gets thrown over a wall from a design team to a build team, because there is no wall and there are no two teams.

Web software

Sites, admin panels, and the systems behind them. PHP and Laravel where the work is a database with people around it. Plain HTML where a page is only a page, which is more often than the industry likes to admit.

Mobile apps

Android first, iOS after. We take it from the idea on the phone call to the listing on Google Play, and we write the privacy policy and fill in the Data safety form that Google will not publish you without.

Hardware and integrations

Talking to devices that were never meant to be talked to. Intercoms, cameras, closed protocols, an API whose documentation is a forum post from 2019. If it answers on a port, we can usually make it useful.

Running it afterwards

Servers, deploys, certificates, mail that actually arrives in an inbox. A product nobody is keeping alive stops being a product about eleven months in.

Work

What we are building right now.

Our own products. We use them every day, so when one of them breaks we find out before a client does.

Android · live on Google Play

ajar

The app that answers the gate intercom from your phone. You see who is there, talk to them, and let them in. At home it goes straight over your own wifi. Away from home it goes through a relay. The app picks the route and never asks you to.

An agent on a Raspberry Pi at the house speaks to a Dahua intercom that has no public API worth the name. Recordings stay in the house. Nothing about your gate is stored on anybody's server.

  • Kotlin
  • Jetpack Compose
  • WebRTC
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Raspberry Pi
The ajar app ringing: the camera at the gate, with buttons to answer or dismiss.
The ajar home screen, with the two gate buttons and the hub's status.

Photographed on the phone it runs on, not a simulator.

Web app · being rebuilt

CodeNews

A news reader for developers with its own CMS behind it, sold on CodeCanyon since 2017. It has been running untouched for long enough that the framework under it is older than some of the phones it is read on.

We are rewriting it on the current stack, and it goes back on sale when it is done. The demo beside this is the version that has been live all along.

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • CMS
  • Rewrite in progress
codebldr.com/codenews
The CodeNews reader: a list of developer news articles.

How we work

Three steps, and none of them is a discovery workshop.

  1. We talk

    You describe the problem; we say what we would build, what it would cost, and what we would not build. If the answer is that you do not need us, you get that answer too.

  2. We build in the open

    You get something you can open in a browser early, and again often after that. It goes on a real machine, not into a slide, so you can change your mind while changing it is still cheap.

  3. We hand it over, or we keep it running

    The code and the servers are yours either way. If you would rather not think about deploys and certificates again, we hold them.

Contact

Tell us what you are building.

Describe the problem and that is enough to start with. The reply comes from the person who would do the work.

We use your address to reply to you and for nothing else. It does not go on a mailing list and we do not pass it to anybody.