About
A small firm, on purpose.
Heat From Fire takes a small number of engagements at a time and finishes them. That constraint is the product — it is what lets the person you talk to also be the person writing the code.
How we work
Software that someone else can maintain.
Most software fails slowly. It works at launch, then becomes expensive to change, and eventually the people who understand it leave. The bill for that arrives years after the decisions that caused it.
So the work here is aimed at the second year, not the first demo. Conventional patterns over clever ones. Migrations that can be run again. Infrastructure written down as code rather than assembled by hand in a console. Documentation that explains why, because the what is already in the repository.
The practice is deliberately narrow — full-stack applications, the services behind them, and the pipelines that deploy them. Work outside that is referred elsewhere rather than taken on and learned at your expense.
Engagements start with a short paid discovery and end with a real handover: source, infrastructure, accounts, and the reasoning behind the design. You should be able to replace us without drama. Most clients then choose not to.
The other half
We also make hardware.
Maddie Synths is our own product line — Eurorack synthesizer kits and completed modules. It is not a side project so much as a standing reminder that shipping a physical thing to a stranger is a good test of whether your process actually works.
Have a project that needs to actually ship?
Send a few sentences about what you are building. You will get a straight answer about whether it is a fit, usually within one business day.