A flow with gates you hold, six rules we do not bend, and three shapes an engagement can take. Written down so you can check us against it.
The same flow runs our own estate and every client engagement. Four of the six stages end at a gate you hold. Nothing ships unverified, and merging is never the finish line.
gate · path
We write down the goal, the success criteria, the systems touched and the people needed. You see it before anything else happens.
gate · spec
One-way doors, meaning data models, wire contracts and store choices, are designed and agreed on paper. Reversible things ship lean.
gate · plan
The spec becomes an ordered task list with a file-ownership map, so parallel work never collides.
no gate
Specialists build in isolated worktrees against a shared ledger. You can see what is in flight and what is blocked without asking.
no gate
Tests, lint and type gates across everything affected, then adversarial review for anything high-stakes. Red does not ship.
gate · ship
Merging deploys nothing. An image is built, pinned, released and reconciled, and the change is done when a probe shows it running.
What done means
A change is done when the pod is running the new image and a probe shows traffic. Not merged, not staged, not "should work". The same standard applies to a landing page, a migration and a model.
These are lifted from the constitution that governs our own estate. They are the tiebreaker when the fast option and the right option disagree.
Root cause over symptom, even when the proper fix is the more annoying one this week. A stopgap is allowed to unblock work already in flight, with the real fix filed at the same time. A stopgap without a filed fix is a defect.
Data models, wire contracts, store choices and dependencies are expensive to reverse, so they get design investment up front. Everything reversible ships lean. Knowing which is which is most of the job.
The polyglot split is deliberate. "It is already wired up" is not an architectural reason. Putting work in the wrong store because that store was convenient is how systems rot from the inside.
Not merged, not deployed to staging, not "should work". Done is the pod running the new image with a probe that proves it. Everything else is a status update.
Every service ships observed: traces, structured logs, metrics, error reporting. A component nobody can see cannot be called working. We learned that from a worker that sat wedged and silent for fifteen days.
Auth, tenancy, telemetry and tracking are built once and serve everything. The anti-pattern is the per-app copy: five slightly different auth flows, five places to fix the same bug.
Fixed scope where scope can be fixed. Staged gates where it cannot. Nothing priced on an undefined scope, because someone always ends up paying for the guess.
When the system has grown faster than the plan did.
A fixed-scope assessment of your architecture, data placement, deploy lane and measurement. You get the map whether or not you go further with us.
Greenfield, or a rescue that needs to stop bleeding.
We design and build the platform: services, data model, event pipelines, deploy lane and the surfaces on top. Staged gates, so you can stop or redirect at each one.
When you want it run, not just delivered.
Ongoing engineering plus operations: releases, capacity, upgrades, incident response and a roadmap reviewed with you each quarter.
Build things that keep working when nobody is watching them.
Jacob, founder of Data Forge. An advanced degree in AI, machine learning and data science, applied to business. Taught data science at Curtin University and the Institute of Data. More than ten years running companies, including a marketing business with over fifty staff. Owner-operator of the SURE group.
I used to run a multi-million dollar marketing company with over fifty staff. On paper it looked like success. Behind the scenes I was constantly putting out fires, working around the clock, and slowly burning out.
Then everything changed. I lost my mum, and I realised how much I had missed while buried in the grind. I left the company, moved home, and began rebuilding with a new goal: create freedom, not stress.
Data Forge is that goal turned into an engineering practice. I build systems that keep working when nobody is watching them, so the people who run businesses can be present, not just productive.
Tell us what you run today and what keeps breaking. We will tell you, plainly, what we would do about it and whether we are the right people to do it.