Say the difficult thing
If the deadline is unrealistic or the architecture is wrong, you hear it from us early and in plain language. Comfortable silence is how projects die quietly.
About us
Small team. Senior only. No bench.
New Byte Order was founded in 2018 by engineers who were tired of watching good projects fail for boring, avoidable reasons. We stayed deliberately small so the people who sell the work are the people who do it.
Why we exist
Most software doesn't fail technically
It fails because nobody wrote down what "done" meant, because the test suite was abandoned in month three, because the one person who understood the deployment left, or because everybody was too polite to say the deadline was fiction.
We're built around removing exactly those failure modes. That's why discovery is fixed-price and written down, why QA sits inside the delivery team rather than after it, and why handover documentation is a deliverable rather than a favour.
What we commit to
- You own every line of code, from the first commit
- A demo every two weeks, working software or an honest explanation
- Estimates with ranges and assumptions, never a single confident number
- Bad news early — the day we know, not the day it's unavoidable
- Documentation and training so you can fire us without drama
Principles
Six things we're stubborn about
Boring technology, mostly
We pick well-understood tools with long support horizons and large hiring pools. Novelty needs to earn its place, and it rarely does in the load-bearing parts.
Tests are not optional
Automated coverage on the paths that matter, running on every commit. A suite you can't trust is technical debt wearing a badge that says 'quality'.
Ship small, ship often
Big-bang releases concentrate risk into the worst possible moment. We'd rather deploy forty times a week and never hold our breath.
Leave the team better
Pairing, review and written decisions. When we leave, your engineers should be more capable than when we arrived — that's a measurable outcome, not a slogan.
Accessible by default
WCAG 2.2 AA is the starting line, not an upgrade. It's cheaper to build in than to retrofit, and it's the right thing to do regardless.
The team
Who you'll actually work with
Fourteen people. Everyone codes, reviews or tests — including the founders.
Matthew Mulder
Founder · Principal Engineer
Hannah Whitfield
Founder · Head of Delivery
Callum Doyle
Mobile Lead · iOS & Android
Nadia Haddad
QA Lead · Test Automation
Come and find out if we get on
The first call is thirty minutes, with an engineer, and costs nothing.