We believe that every company that builds anything impressive must inevitably accumulate a large amount of technical debt along the way. We founded LD to help companies manage the complexity that makes even the most skilled engineers less productive at building software products as an organization grows. We specialize in legacy code, technical debt, and all the parts of software development that cause the worst headaches for your best engineers. At the beginning of our relationship with a new client, we offer a free analysis and report of the full history and current status of your organization from a software perspective. So, - if your company has important code that no one fully understands, - if you're worried that onboarding has become intimidating for new hires, - if much of your most essential code is only fully understood by one long-time developer wizard, and the demands on that person's time are becoming unsustainable, we can help. We offer our services free of charge until our initial report is complete, or until the end of the second week, whichever comes first. We do this to ensure that our relationship with your organization begins by offering value, before asking you to take our claims on faith. At the same time, we understand that many organizations face regulatory burdens or procedural complexities that cannot be meaningfully analyzed in two weeks. For these organizations, we simply offer the first two weeks of work free. We do this in order to give our clients and ourselves the time to assess essentials like cultural fit, overlap between your needs and our skillsets, and other must-haves of professional life that are difficult or impossible to assess via the traditional cycle of interviews and hiring. If, at the end of the free trial period, you're not excited to continue the relationship, you owe us nothing. If we choose to continue working together, our role will be to work with your engineers, and build reusable tools to make their daily tasks easier, more productive, and less overwhelming. As your organization scales, and as the demands on your most essential engineers' time grows, eventually an organization reaches a stage at which having all of its engineers deployed toward the development of products, research, or customer facing software applications becomes a recipe for disaster. The most elite Soldiers and Generals, under the best Commander in Chief will eventually lose any battle against a group of disorganized amateurs with much better tools. It is not raw skill that makes the elite builders, soldiers, or publishers of today more productive than the best members of their fields 1,000 years ago. The difference lies in one word: Tools. All companies with finite funding and finite time face the decision of where to invest the time and energy of their team. But software is less tangible than a building or a bridge, so even the best C-Suite and management team often misses how much more efficient their builders could be if their builders didn't also have to build their own tools. The master builder does not make the hammer, the drill, the circular saw, or the crane. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, two of the most influential and productive developers in our field's history, had a brilliant manager named Doug McIlroy. Without a manager like him, their work on Unix and C may never have left Bell Labs. Thanks to him, their work still runs the world of technology, through latter day systems like Linux, and through the use of C to implement modern languages like python. McIlroy understood the importance of tools. It is now 56 years since Unix began, and 48 years since Doug summarized his philosophy of engineering in the following short list of principles: - Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features". - Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input. - Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them. - Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them. Tech changes more rapidly than any other industry. It is not easy to find timeless principles in our field. But we believe that no engineering team in the half century since, nor any team in the modern era of LLMs, Agents, and AI can afford to neglect the importance of tools. As the baseline of what we call competence at our jobs increasingly becomes what would have been called super-human ten years ago, it is not we the humans whose hand will create the majority of what we make. It is Tools. To build a product, stop building products. It is now not unheard of for products built over years by top teams to be recreated in an afternoon by a clever dev with the right tools. The reports of our field's death have been greatly exaggerated. Nothing has really changed in our field in the past fifty years. Our field has never been one where the winning team is the one with the most money, the most devs, the most planning, or the least sleep. In our field, it is virtually impossible to beat whichever team is best able to make these machines of ours do the most of what they want in exchange for the least effort. Tools alone determine how well we do that. If you'd like to know more about the status of your organization's software, past and present, we'd love to meet for a no obligation trial of two weeks. If the first two weeks go well, we'd love to help your organization better achieve its goals by doing what we do best: investing in the long term success of your company by building tools to turn your organization's daily problems into effortless solutions. Contact us email or text for a free consultation. email: [email protected] linkedin: [thedynamiclinker](https://www.linkedin.com/company/thedynamiclinker) phone: 425-331-0322