A studio by Peter Lewis.

I started on a helpdesk at a rural telephone cooperative in Texas when I was sixteen, and I was writing code for them before the summer was out. That was twenty-five years ago. Since then I've built payment systems that had to survive a PCI audit, real-time scheduling platforms that carried a company's core revenue, and more internal tools than I can count. Today I lead a software engineering team at a global research firm, where my job is mostly making sure things stay up and the people building them keep getting better.

Haven Rock Labs is the other half. It's deliberately small, and it runs on evenings and weekends — which means I take on a handful of projects at a time rather than a pipeline of them. If that sounds like a limitation, it's the honest kind: you get the person who wrote the code, not an account manager, and I don't take work I can't maintain.

The church and nonprofit focus isn't a market I picked off a spreadsheet. I've been the volunteer running the website and the live stream since 2010 — eleven years at a church outside San Antonio, and at Pleasant Grove in Ronda since we moved to North Carolina. I've been the person in the sound booth at 8am on a Sunday when the stream won't start. I know what it's like to inherit a site nobody can edit, to need a service time changed before Wednesday, and to have a budget that is genuinely, seriously small.

That's the whole reason this exists. Small organizations get treated as either too small to bother with or as a template to be stamped out. They deserve software built by someone who understands what happens when it breaks on a Sunday morning.