Doby Baxter Computing
Independent Software Engineering
Software should never fail a person in silence.
That is the standard I build to: systems that catch a wrong state early, say so in words a person can act on, and carry the responsibility themselves instead of handing it to whoever depends on them.
I'm Doby Baxter, a software engineer in Sheffield, UK, working remotely with clients anywhere.
For small businesses & independent founders
Founding Client Program
Testing and validation shouldn’t be a luxury only big teams can afford. This is for businesses with no engineering department, running software set up by someone who has since moved on. The first step is a read-only look at the part most likely to fail quietly, for one clear price agreed before anything starts.
Sound familiar?
- Something breaks after a setting is changed, and nobody can say which change did it.
- Two systems that should agree, like stock, prices, bookings or invoices, keep drifting apart.
- A job that runs overnight sometimes doesn’t, and you hear about it from a customer first.
- The person who set it all up has moved on, and nobody wants to touch it.
- An AI feature you’ve added mostly works, except when it quietly doesn’t.
- You’re paying to fix the same thing more than once.
If two or three of those landed, that’s what the review below is for. If none of them did, you probably don’t need me yet, and I’d rather say so than sell you a review. See three examples in plain English →
Starter Reliability Review
£200 fixed
- The part of your setup that’s causing the trouble
- A careful look, with nothing changed
- A plain-English report of what to fix first, plus one follow-up
Want it fixed too? Find & Fix is the review and the fix in one job, £650 fixed, and I can put the fix in place for you. Fixes, bigger reviews and ongoing cover are all fixed-price too, and returning clients keep a standing 25% thank-you on every one-off job. Full breakdown on the services page.
Founding seats, kept small: a £200 first job, then 25% off everything after it, monthly cover included, for as long as the program runs. See the program and apply.
The starter review
How it works
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Tell me what keeps going wrong
Answer three questions by email or through the contact form. No template and nothing to download, and you’ll have a reply within one working day.
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Agree what to look at
We settle on the one part of your setup most likely to fail quietly. The price is £200 fixed, paid before I start, and nothing starts until you say yes.
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Get your findings
A read-only look, so nothing in your system is touched. A plain-English report of what to fix first within 5 working days, plus one follow-up.
What I Do
Different problems, one rule: never fail a person in silence. Whatever you call it, a check, validation, or guardrails, the job is the same: catch the mistake before it reaches the people relying on it, and say so plainly.
Configuration & Validation
One wrong setting shouldn't be able to take your whole system down. I make sure it can't.
See the product →AI Workflow Reliability
AI features that loop, drift, or break silently, made deterministic and traceable.
See the product →Developer Tooling
The fragile manual step everyone dreads, turned into one safe command.
Scientific Software
Research pipelines that give the same answer twice, and that others can reproduce.
Systems Architecture
The failure modes hiding in your system, made visible before they bite.
Track record
- Shipped Pyxel Config Lab in the official ESA Pyxel 2.14 release
- Ships pyxel-config-core and the LLM Workflow Router on PyPI
- Built Nimbus Vestige: self-hosted forensic reconstruction for cloud identity incidents
- Built Nexa: an offline, self-checking validation assistant for Odoo
- Merged contributor to GitLab core systems
- Featured in This Week in 4n6 for research on cloud identity forensic reconstruction
Cited in the peer-reviewed literature
Named in an ESA & ESO Paper
“Notably, Doby Baxter has led the development of a new GUI, making Pyxel more accessible to users from a broader range of scientific and engineering backgrounds.”
Lemmel, F., Affatato, V., Jha, A., Hernandez, E., Prod’homme, T., Serra, B., George, E., and Mansour, M., “Pyxel 3.0: New features and applications for the collaborative instrument simulator,” Proc. SPIE 14157, X-Ray, Optical, and Infrared Detectors for Astronomy XII, 141571I (19 August 2026).
Read the paper: doi:10.1117/12.3104656 →Professional endorsement
"Doby has demonstrated strong technical skills, thoughtful system-level thinking, and a clear focus on usability and maintainability. He played a key role in developing innovative tooling driven by real user and community needs. He is proactive, reliable, and communicates clearly, particularly when working on complex or cross-cutting features."
The standard behind the work
No Silent Failure
Six musts a system needs to be fit for purpose. The shortest of them: failing is allowed, failing quietly is not.
Independent vision · open blueprint
Social Resource Floor
A separate, long-term idea of mine, held at arm’s length from client work: human survival should not depend on financial access.
Let's build something reliable
Whatever's breaking, or about to, tell me what you're working on.
Doby Baxter
No account managers and no hand-offs: you work with me directly. I read every message myself: starter inquiries get an answer within one working day, and everything else within a few days.