About
One engineer,
not an agency.
Tesseract Technologies is a technical studio in Nairobi, Kenya. Today that means one engineer — and you should know that before you talk to us, not after.
Most firms selling what we sell would leave that vague. The website would say "our team", the photos would be stock, and you would work out the truth somewhere around the second invoice.
We would rather say it first, because for the work we take on it is genuinely the better arrangement. A mid-sized company automating a reporting process does not need five people. It needs one who understands the problem, and it needs them to still understand it in eight months. What an agency adds to that is a project manager, a handoff, and a margin.
What it costs you is capacity. We take on a small number of engagements at a time, and when we are full we say so rather than queueing you behind someone else. If your problem genuinely needs a team of six, we will tell you that too.
- 01
The person who scopes it is the person who builds it
Nothing is translated through an account manager and nothing is handed to a junior once the contract is signed. What you discuss is what gets written.
- 02
You own everything from day one
The code, the repository, the cloud accounts, the domains. Not licensed, not hosted on our platform, not dependent on a contract renewal. If you walk away you lose a supplier, not a system.
- 03
Boring infrastructure on purpose
Standard, widely-known tools that any competent engineer can pick up. Nothing clever enough that only its author can maintain it.
- 04
Written down as it is built
How it runs, how to deploy it, what breaks it and what to do about that — delivered with the work, not promised afterwards.
- 05
Turned down early rather than delivered badly
If the work is wrong for us, or the answer is that you should buy something off the shelf, you hear it in the first reply. That costs us a project and saves you one.
"What happens if you disappear?"
It is the right question and it deserves a real answer rather than reassurance. Here is what you would be holding if we vanished tomorrow:
- Your source code, in your repository, under your account.
- Your cloud infrastructure, billed to you, on a mainstream provider.
- Documentation written as the work was done, describing how to run and change it.
- No proprietary runtime, no licence key, no platform of ours in the path.
In other words: a system another engineer can take over, priced as a normal contract rather than a rescue. That is a deliberate constraint on how we build, and it is the same constraint whether we are around or not.
- Tested before it ships
- Behaviour is verified against known-good values, not eyeballed. The site you are reading has several hundred assertions behind it.
- Secure by default
- Authentication fails closed. Nothing stores an IP address or a raw user agent that does not need to.
- Accessible by default
- Contrast and touch targets are measured against WCAG AA, not estimated.
- Costed honestly
- We will tell you what it costs to run, not only what it costs to build. The second number is the one that surprises people.
None of that is unusual among good engineers. It is unusual to write it down and be held to it, which is the only reason it is here.
The fastest way to find out if we're right for this
Six questions about the problem, in plain language. You get a real answer — including that you should not build anything.