< What I Do />
Different problems, one idea behind all of them: systems that are predictable, observable, and hard to misconfigure. Whether your team calls it a preflight check, a sanity check, validation, or guardrails, the job is the same: catch the bad state before it ships.
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.
Security & Forensics Tooling
After an incident: how it actually happened, traced to the evidence, never guessed.
See the product →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 on PyPI — an MCP server that lets any AI assistant check ESA Pyxel configs against the real schema before they run
- Author of the LLM Workflow Router — source-available and installable from PyPI
- Built Nimbus Vestige — self-hosted forensic reconstruction for cloud identity incidents
- Built Nexa — an offline, self-checking validation assistant for Odoo and TypeScript
- Merged contributor to GitLab core systems
- Published software on PyPI, the Firefox Add-on Store, and itch.io
- Featured in This Week in 4n6 for research on cloud identity forensic reconstruction
For small businesses & independent founders
< Founding Client Program />
Testing and validation shouldn’t be a luxury only big teams can afford. Most of my work is with businesses that have no engineering department at all — the software that runs the place was set up by someone who has since moved on, and it mostly behaves. So I’ve built an accessible first step: a focused, 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 — stock, prices, bookings, 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.
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
- Prioritised findings in plain language, plus one follow-up
Want the top finding actually closed afterwards? That’s £450 fixed. Bigger jobs start at £900 read-only and £2,500 hands-on, and standing cover is £150 a month — full breakdown on the services page.
Stay on as a regular client and you keep a standing 25% thank-you — because I want your business to succeed, not just get through this month.
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."
Independent vision · open blueprint
< Social Resource Floor />
A separate, long-term idea of mine held at arm’s length from client work, and open to collaborators.
A floor beneath which no person should fall (My long-term vision)
Human survival should not depend on financial access.
The Social Resource Floor is an open blueprint for a universal structure through which people can access the resources needed for basic survival grounded in being human, not in financial status. It’s designed as a coordination layer above existing social-protection systems like OpenSPP and OpenG2P, not a replacement for them.
At its heart is a dream of a world where every human being has access to the resources they need to survive, live with dignity, and have a meaningful quality of life regardless of their financial circumstances, where they live, or the government and economic systems they happen to exist within.
It’s early-stage and exploratory, which is exactly when extra minds matter most. Contributors from social protection, engineering, policy, or lived experience are welcome.
< 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 enquiries get an answer within one working day, and everything else within a few days.