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Jonathan McHargConsulting

Software, AI and hosting

Software that gets built, secured and hosted by the same person.

Custom web applications for businesses that have outgrown the spreadsheet. Practical AI automation for the admin nobody should still be doing by hand. And UK servers to run it all on, set up properly and looked after afterwards.

The pattern I keep meeting

It already works. That's exactly the problem.

Somebody inside the business built something. A tool put together with an AI assistant, a database that grew out of a spreadsheet, an application running on one machine under somebody's desk. It works, and people now depend on it.

Nobody has asked what happens when that machine dies. Or who can reach the data in it. Or whether it would survive the first person who tries the login page with bad intentions. The business has quietly become dependent on something nobody is responsible for, and usually nobody has noticed yet.

An electrical engineering firm had built two applications themselves and were running them on a machine in the office. I added a proper security layer to both, specified and built them a cloud server to run on, and now host and maintain the lot. They kept the thing they had built. It simply stopped being a risk sitting on the balance sheet.

That is the whole offer in one sentence: the person who writes it is the person who secures it, hosts it, and answers the phone about it at four o'clock on a Friday.

What that's built on

Boring technology, chosen on purpose.

PHP and Laravel, with MySQL or PostgreSQL behind it, and Python where a job genuinely suits it. None of that is fashionable, and all of it is the point: these are tools with twenty years of documentation, a large pool of people who know them, and no chance of the framework being abandoned in eighteen months.

If you ever need to move the work to somebody else, you will be able to. I would rather build something you could leave than something you cannot.

  • Fixed-price quotes, agreed before anything starts
  • Every project in a private GitHub repository you can see from the first commit, documented well enough to hand to another developer
  • Hosted in the UK, on infrastructure I specify and manage
  • Security built in from the start, not added when somebody asks
  • The same person for the build, the hosting and the support afterwards

Start with the problem, not the technology.

Most of these conversations begin with something that is taking too long, breaking too often, or sitting somewhere it shouldn't. No charge for the first one, and if what you need is outside what I do, I will tell you and point you somewhere better.