What we built,
and who for.
A name goes up here once the client has said in writing that it may, and comes down the day they ask.
The rest of the work is described rather than attributed, which is why this page is shorter than the client list. For anything not named, references are available under NDA on a call, which is slower and more honest than a wall of logos nobody checks.
Three clients. Three live builds.
4D Collective
- Sector
- Event management and marketing, Cape Town
- Built
- Their website, designed and built end to end.
- Includes
- Full marketing site
- Work gallery and case study
- Three service divisions
- Client list and enquiry route
- Status
- Live
- Live at
- fourdmarketing.co.za
Redefine Education
- Sector
- Education conference, Johannesburg
- Built
- The conference site, designed and built end to end.
- Includes
- Full conference site
- Programme, venue and speakers
- Call for papers and registration routes
- Countdown to the October dates
- Status
- Live
- Live at
- redefineeducation.co.za
Chiro London
- Sector
- Chiropractic practice, London
- Built
- CareBook, the practice management system the clinic runs on, and a rebuild of the website.
- Includes
- Calendar, patients, treatment notes
- Invoicing, wait list, reporting
- Public online booking
- No double booking, enforced in the database
- Status
- Practice management live, website rebuild in build
Five things we do. Nothing else.
AI systems
Most of this work is not the model. It is everything around the model: what it is allowed to see, what it is allowed to do, how you know it is still right next month.
- Agent and tool-use architecture
- Retrieval, chunking, hybrid search, reranking
- Evaluation sets and regression harnesses
- Guardrails, refusals and audit trails
- Token, cost and latency budgets
Custom software
Applications built for one organisation and one problem, where the off-the-shelf option would cost more in workarounds than the build costs outright.
- Web applications and internal tooling
- APIs, webhooks and integration work
- Authentication, roles and permissions
- Background jobs and scheduling
- Test coverage on the paths that matter
Data engineering
Ingestion, modelling and the unglamorous work of making numbers agree with each other before anyone puts them on a dashboard.
- Ingestion and change capture
- Warehouse modelling and transformation
- Reconciliation and data quality checks
- Reporting and analytics surfaces
Websites and digital builds
Marketing sites, campaign builds and the front door of the business. Built to load quickly on a bad connection, because that is the connection your customer has.
- Design and front-end build
- Core Web Vitals and accessibility
- Content editing where it is warranted
- Analytics and search fundamentals
Productisation and hardening
Taking something that works for one client and making it sellable to the next fifty. This is where most promising internal tools quietly stop.
- Multi-tenancy and isolation
- Observability, alerting and backups
- Security review and dependency hygiene
- Deployment pipelines and rollback
Three ways to buy it. All of them fixed.
Build sprint
A defined window with a defined output at the end of it. Best when the shape of the thing is known and the risk is whether it can be done in the time.
Build to spec
Scoped build, priced whole, billed against milestones you can inspect. Best when the destination is agreed and the road is long.
Hardening and handover
Something already exists and needs to become dependable, documented and safe to hand to somebody else. Frequently the highest value work we do.
Priced on scope and date, never on hours. If the scope changes, the price and the date change with it, in writing, before the work does.
What you own when we leave.
Nothing is held back as leverage. No proprietary runtime you have to keep paying for, no account in our name that you have to ask us to unlock, no undocumented step that only one person knows.
Retained support is available afterwards and plenty of clients take it, and it should stay a choice.
Quinbro advises. Lampblack builds.
Where Quinbro is advising a client on a build and Lampblack is one of the candidates to deliver it, the client is told so in writing and gets at least two independent quotes alongside ours.
We would rather lose the work than have the advice look bought.
Tell us what needs to exist, and by when.
Lampblack is soot collected off the inside of an oil lamp, the oldest pigment there is. It is what remains when light burns clean.