Melbourne & Brisbane · Australia-wide · since 2010
Thirty years of software architecture and delivery, now applied by directing AI agents, with continuous production responsibility for public-facing Azure workloads since 2011.
The distinction that matters is between generating a system and carrying it. We do both.
What we build
Between those two ends sit the network, the database, the domain model and the client build, and we work at every one of them. A static company website, a web application, a native mobile app, or an enterprise platform.
A finished public site: who the company is, what it offers, and how to get in touch. Complete on its own, and structured so it can later carry an application.
From $2,000 upfront. Hosting and updates from $500 a year. See a static company website.
Business applications built to stay cheap to change years after launch: the backend, the web front end, and the database underneath. Equally, the systems that have already become expensive to change. Re-platforming, and migrations that keep every record. A fifteen-year production platform was rebuilt from the ground up and cut over onto a new stack, with a live user base throughout.
C# / .NET 10 · ASP.NET Core · TypeScript · SvelteKit · React · PostgreSQL · SQL Server · CQRS / event sourcing
The product in people’s hands. Mobile applications shipped to both stores from one codebase, added when a business or ministry needs the app.
iOS · Android · Ionic / Capacitor · one codebase
Systems at the scale of banks, airlines, universities and government, and community platforms that have sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. Ongoing responsibility for a live Azure platform: incidents, patching, certificates, capacity, release and rollback, and backups that have actually been restored.
Azure · AWS · Linux containers · Service Bus · Cosmos DB · PostgreSQL · on-call
Why “agentic architect”
For most of thirty years, delivering software meant assembling people. That is no longer the binding constraint. A great deal of the work that once justified a team of fifteen — or an offshore one of thirty — now runs on GPUs, under direction, at a pace that makes the old shape of a project look odd. This is not a prediction. It is how we work.
That is good news, and it is widely shared. More people can build software today than at any point in those thirty years, and the distance from an idea to a working prototype has never been shorter. For a business with a product to move, the opportunity is real, and it changes what to hire for. The leverage has moved from the size of the team to the direction of the work: knowing which of the hundred things an agent could build is the one that moves the product, and holding an architecture steady at that pace. That has always been senior work. It still is.
The same arithmetic changes who bespoke software is for. The enterprise-grade system that would have been quoted in the millions five years ago — shaped around how an operation actually works — is now within reach of a government department, a regional business, a family company that has outgrown its spreadsheets. The real thing, built alongside the people who will own it, and handed over in their control.
What has not changed is the part that was always scarce. Knowing what to build. Knowing how to structure it so it is still cheap to change in five years. Knowing, when an answer comes back fluent and confident, that it is wrong. Knowing what good looks like. Judgement was never available at a discount, and it does not arrive by adding seats.
The rewrite described below was delivered this way. Roughly 1,500 commits, most of the code written by directing AI agents under close architectural direction. The practices that make that safe are the ones that made a codebase maintainable long before any of this: pure domain logic, tests that run in milliseconds, generated clients, and rules enforced structurally rather than by convention.
The tooling changed. The engineering did not. That is what “agentic architect” means here.
Our approach
DaD Digital’s two long-running platforms are partnerships. The business partners brought the idea, the domain and the market, and we brought the ability to build it and keep it running. Both have been live on Azure for the better part of fifteen years: the infrastructure, the databases, the backups, the certificates, the pipelines and the phone call. Taking an idea to market and then holding it there for fifteen years teaches lessons that project work does not, mostly about the gap between what a system is documented to do and what it does at three in the morning.
We write the application code, and went deep on infrastructure because the work sits on both sides. When something breaks at 2am, whether it is a platform fault or an application fault is usually the expensive question, and we can answer it on the same call.
Much of the work has been explaining technical risk to people accountable for it but not fluent in it: CTOs, CEOs, and a national executive team. The non-technical person in the room should finish the meeting knowing what the risk is and what it will cost.
The platforms have stayed running for fifteen years because of documentation and automation. Runbooks, pinned and reproducible builds, tests that run in milliseconds, and rules enforced structurally rather than by convention.
Enterprise solutions
Enterprise solutions that once took a team of software developers and cost millions to execute can now be implemented for a six-figure amount. The saving does not come from a thinner scope or a cheaper team. It comes from the foundation we have built over decades of advanced architecture: established, tested libraries that encapsulate best enterprise practice, refactored by agents, reviewed by humans, and deployed to a high standard on a short timeframe. Each new project starts on that proven foundation rather than from nothing, and the advantage carries through the whole build.
Decades of advanced architecture, captured in established, tested libraries that encapsulate best enterprise practice. Your project does not start from scratch; it starts from a foundation proven in production, so the budget goes on what is particular to your operation.
AI agents carry the volume of the work: writing features, and restructuring the code as the system grows so that it stays cheap to change. They work inside boundaries the codebase itself enforces.
Agents write the code. People read it, approve it, and answer for what ships. Nothing goes live on an agent’s say-so, and that review is where senior judgement is spent.
Automated tests and a single deployment pipeline carry each change into production, on a short timeframe. The standard is the one our own platforms run on, and the pace holds because the foundations are already in place.
Have an enterprise system in mind? Book a free consultation, and we will tell you plainly what it would take.
Enterprise applications
An online ticketing platform for community, not-for-profit, and ministry events, built and run as a large-scale web application. Version 1 went live in 2017. Version 2 was released in 2020. yourtickets.ai is version 3: a ground-up rebuild of that platform, coming soon at the beginning of 2027.
The platform has sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. Version 3 carries that product forward as an enterprise-ready application: the public pages, the organiser tools, and the years of records behind them. It is the far end of the same range as a static company website. A business or ministry can start at either end.
Track record
Names of employers and clients are given in conversation. This page describes the substance. References on request.
15 years
continuous
Both have stayed live for the better part of fifteen years, in production since 2011 and 2015. One serves over 10,000 registered users, with personal data behind a login. The other has sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. Compute, databases, storage, networking, DNS and TLS, backup and restore, capacity, release, and incident response have remained with this practice for the life of both. Both operate under the Australian Privacy Principles.
2 years
enterprise
Linux containers, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, Event Hubs, and Service Fabric, with Log Analytics, KQL, and Datadog, at a scale where a latency regression is measured in money. The work sat inside a large organisation’s governance. Hosting cost came down by profiling and rewriting the slow paths.
Inception to
hundreds of
customers
Technical design and lead development of a SaaS product from first commit through to hundreds of large corporate customers — banks, airlines, universities, and government departments — handling commercially sensitive data. CQRS and event sourcing on .NET and PostgreSQL, with the team recruited and coached along the way.
~1,500
commits
A ground-up rewrite onto .NET 10 and PostgreSQL, running as containers on Ansible-provisioned Linux behind Caddy, with one deployment pipeline serving three products from shared base images. The data migration was pinned by tests against real production records, with explicit partial-failure reporting. Most of the code was written by directing AI agents under close architectural direction, on practices that keep a codebase reviewable: pure domain logic, fast tests, and rules enforced in the structure.
Regulated &
government
A major business-intelligence programme delivered into a large federal government department. Government departments among the customers of the platform above. Work to formal change control across betting, legal, and enterprise settings. Against the Essential Eight, managed patching, multi-factor authentication, restricted administration, pinned images, and daily backups with tested restores are standard practice here.
Across
the years
Enterprise client portals, integrated accounting, national supply-chain and B2B integration, and mobile applications shipped to both stores from one codebase. Master-data leadership through a group-wide ERP transformation. The measure of that work is that it kept running.
Free consultation
A free 15 minute conversation. Bring the organisation as it is: a small business, a ministry, or an enterprise platform.
We will help you wherever you are, whether it is a static company website, a web application, a native mobile app, or an enterprise platform.
damien.sawyer@daddigital.com jeff.hoffard@daddigital.com
Offices in Melbourne and Brisbane. Service is Australia-wide.
Choose a time. Bring the idea as it stands, and we will say where we can help.
