A small studio, on purpose.
ZLOVEFU is a backend engineering studio of 2–10 people. We take on one or two engagements at a time, work directly with the people who will maintain the system, and write down what we decided. The studio stays small because the alternative — account managers relaying requirements to engineers — is where most projects quietly go wrong.
Four rules we keep paying for.
No hand-offs
The person who scopes the work is the person who builds it. Every layer of translation between "what the business needs" and "what gets committed" is a place where intent is lost — usually silently.
Boring tools
Postgres, a queue, a cron job and a lot of boring code outlive clever frameworks. We optimise for the person reading this in three years, who will not have our context and will not think our abstractions are cute.
Write it down
Decisions, trade-offs, and the reasons a thing was rejected live next to the code. If the system is only understood by the person who built it, it is not finished.
Small surface area
Every service, table and integration is something to maintain at 3am. We add them reluctantly and remove them whenever an existing piece can be made to do the job.
Small by structure, not by accident.
One or two engagements run at a time. That is a hard limit, not a marketing line — it is what makes a Friday demo of running software possible instead of a status email.
Work happens in the client's repository, in the client's cloud account, with the client's people in the room. We keep four hours of overlap with Asia and North America, and default to written updates over meetings.
- Staff augmentation — we do not rent engineers by the month
- Brand, marketing sites or mobile apps
- Rewrites of systems we have not read
- Fixed-price promises on unscoped work
- Take on a fifth engagement because it is a big one
What is true right now.
Availability
One build slot open this quarter. Sprints can usually begin sooner.
Time zone
Replies within one business day. Calls scheduled in the overlap window, not at 2am your time.
How to start
Two paragraphs about the system and the problem. If it is not a fit, the first reply says so.
Want the longer version?
The notes are where we write about the parts that keep breaking.