blunt & snakes - Tailored applications, fractional CTO & scale engineering
blunt & snakes, tailored applications

Five senior people who ship the software other teams call impossible, then stay to run it.

Work with us See what we build
01

What we actually do

Tailored applications

Full-stack products built to a business, not to a template. Node, TypeScript, PHP, Vue, with front-end integration treated as craft rather than chore.

Fractional CTO

Technical direction, hiring, architecture and roadmap for founders who need a CTO's judgement without a CTO's headcount. Eight years in the seat, three companies.

Scale & performance

Socket engines, caching, load testing with k6, Kubernetes, observability. We take systems that buckle at five hundred users and remove the ceiling entirely.

Legacy migration

Ten-year-old platforms moved to modern stacks without downtime, with the back-end rebuilt underneath and every piece of content intact.

Product & UI/UX

Design in-house, from Figma to shipped interface. Design systems, responsive behaviour, PWA and native wrappers with Capacitor.

Trust & quality

Security audits, SSO and SAML, end-to-end and unit tests with Cypress and Playwright, CI/CD, SEO and SSR, documentation you can hand to anyone.

02

Selected work

Clients stay unnamed on purpose: NDAs, and frankly the stack matters more than the logo. Names available in conversation.

Technical management
A French luxury maison
2016 to today

We run development of a global employee intranet used across every market. We migrated it from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and rebuilt the entire back-end underneath, keeping SSO, search and caching live throughout.

Drupal 10 NodeJS PHP Vue JS SSO / SAML Varnish SOLR Jenkins MariaDB Playwright
Development & technical lead
A US digital-events platform
2021 to today

Their socket engine buckled at scale, so we re-coded it end to end for 2,500 simultaneous users and made the architecture scale past that, removing the participant ceiling for good. We also built a Slack-like real-time chat inside their event CRM, rebuilt their lead-analytics tooling, and shipped an NFT minting contract for one of their enterprise clients. One of us is their dedicated technical lead for bespoke yearly challenges.

SocketIO uWebSockets NodeJS Vue JS PgSQL AWS Amazon Athena Solidity IPFS S3
CTO
A Solana-based social network
2022 to 2023

We led a team of seven engineers building a social platform where every profile mints its own currency, valued by what its owner publishes, with decentralised content storage to keep it censorship-resistant. Shipped and running before the wider crypto market took the project down with it.

Solana Rust IPFS NodeJS Vue 3 MySQL Redis GitLab CI Docker Cypress
CTO
A US point-of-sale operator
2017 to 2020

A complete point-of-sale system with online ordering that became a market leader in its state, processing more than $15M every month. We worked with the state regulator on transaction compliance, and drove in-store hardware from Raspberry Pis running a custom Debian-based distribution we built.

Laravel PHP Vue JS MySQL Raspberry Pi Debian
Development
A French public-safety institution
2019 to 2020

A whole new section of a national government website, plus a rebuilt homepage. Public-sector accessibility, editorial workflow and national traffic expectations included.

PHP Drupal 8 Vue JS Google Maps MySQL
Our own product
omnomnom.app
2020 to today

Our own cooking and nutrition app, used daily by thousands of people on six platforms. Recipes import from any site, video or photo, then get analysed against 39 nutrients from a database we curated by hand with dietitians. Nutrition is computed, never generated.

NodeJS VueJS Redis Stripe
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03

Five people, no layers

Friends before colleagues, remote for sixteen years. Everyone you meet in the kick-off writes, designs or decides. There is nobody to escalate to, because you already have them.

Fractional CTO

Architecture, roadmap, hiring and the hard technical calls. Eight years as CTO across three companies.

Lead developer, platform

Back-end and platform: Node, PHP, TypeScript, data modelling, the parts that must not fall over.

Lead developer, interfaces

Front-end integration as a craft: Vue, performance, responsive behaviour, native wrappers.

Designer

Product and interface design in-house: Figma, design systems, flows that survive real users.

Project management & client relations

Scoping, planning and the day-to-day relationship. Your single answer for anything that is not code.

04

How we work

01
We audit before we quote

A short paid discovery on the real codebase and the real constraints. You get a written technical read either way, useful even if you never hire us.

02
One team, one thread

Kanban, weekly demo, direct access to the people building. No account manager relaying your question to someone who relays it back.

03
Tested, documented, yours

CI/CD, end-to-end coverage and documentation ship with the feature. Nothing we build depends on us staying, though clients tend to keep us for years.

04
We stay on call

Ad-hoc retainers, yearly challenges, an on-call CTO for the board meeting. Long relationships are the whole business model.

{ let’s talk }

Tell us what’s stuck.

A migration nobody wants to touch, a platform that falls over under load, a product with no technical owner. Those are our three favourite emails.

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