A senior practice — deliberately small.
SourceMain is the engineering practice of Mike Ball, a software engineer with 38 years of experience building production systems. The point of staying small is the same as the point of staying senior: every engagement gets attention from someone who has built and shipped systems like yours before.
Software is a long-running conversation, not a deliverable.
The systems we work on tend to outlive the engagement that produced them — sometimes by a decade or more. So we optimize for the version of your engineering team that exists two years from now: the one that has to maintain, extend, and operate whatever we built or touched together.
That has practical consequences. We default to small commits, named seams, observable behavior, and documentation that matches reality. We avoid frameworks-of-the-month when boring choices will outlast them. We say "I don't know yet" out loud, then go find out.
Most of all, we treat clients as peers, not buyers of mystery. If we recommend something, you'll know why and what it costs. If we disagree internally, you'll probably hear the disagreement.
Generalists, by design.
Stacks aren't a religion here. We pick the boring tools that will outlast the project, and we work across the full surface — backend, frontend, data, infrastructure, and AI.