Truth before comfort
Clients hire consultants for judgement. That is worthless if it bends to what the client hopes to hear.
About
A consultancy for the whole life of a software project
The Luminary Corp exists because software projects don't only need starting. They need finishing, repairing, understanding and looking after — and that work deserves the same care as a shiny new build.
Why we do rescue work
A large share of software projects run late, run over, or never launch. When that happens, the owner is usually left with a repository they can't evaluate, a relationship that has broken down, and advice from every direction to throw it all away and start again.
Often that advice is wrong. Troubled projects frequently have a sound core and a small number of serious, fixable problems. What they lack is someone willing to read the code carefully, say honestly what state it is in, and do the unglamorous work of making it right.
That is the work we chose to specialise in, alongside building new products the way we wish every inherited project had been built: documented, tested, owned by the client, and ready to be handed to someone else at any moment.
The name
A luminary is a source of light. Most of what we do comes down to that: making a project's real condition visible to the people responsible for it, so they can make good decisions.
What we believe
Principles behind the work
Repair is a craft
Improving existing software safely is harder than writing new code, and more valuable than it gets credit for.
Boring is a feature
Proven tools, simple designs and tested backups. Excitement belongs in your product, not your infrastructure.
No lock-in, ever
If the only thing keeping a client is that they can't leave, something has gone badly wrong.
Write it down
Decisions, designs, runbooks. Software outlives the memory of the people who built it.
Respect the last team
Nearly everyone before us did their best under constraints we can't see. We fix forward and leave the blame out.
Who we're for
Anyone whose business depends on its software
Founders
Building a first product, or recovering one that an earlier team left unfinished.
Small and mid-sized businesses
Replacing spreadsheets, connecting systems, and keeping the software they depend on healthy.
Established companies
Modernizing legacy systems and adding capacity or senior expertise to in-house teams.
The thing they share: software matters to their business, and they want straight answers about it.
Let's talk about your project
New, broken or somewhere in between.