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.
Based in the United Kingdom, 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 made-up examples in plain English →
Starter Reliability Review
£200 fixed
- One small service or pipeline: a slice, not a whole estate
- A read-only pass over its config and structure
- Prioritized findings in plain language, plus one follow-up
Fixes, bigger reviews and ongoing cover are all fixed-price too, and returning clients keep a standing 25% thank-you. Full breakdown on the services page.
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 the slice
We settle on the one part of your setup most likely to fail quietly. The price is £200 fixed, and nothing starts until you sign off.
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Get your findings
A read-only pass, so nothing in your system is touched. Prioritized findings in plain language within 5 working days, plus one follow-up.
What I Do
Different problems, one rule: never fail a person in silence. Whether you call it a preflight check, a sanity check, validation, or guardrails, the job is the same: catch the bad state before it ships, and say so plainly.
Configuration & Validation
One wrong value shouldn't be able to take down production. 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.
Trusted by users, contributors, and engineering teams
- 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.