About

Small and senior on purpose.

Six people. Everybody here has shipped something that had to keep working after launch.

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Founder

Ryan North
Founder, Lightwell Development

I got my first computer at five. A Commodore 64, and I typed BASIC into it out of a book, because that's what there was. After that came an Apple IIgs, then a Mac, then PC, and I've been on some version of that machine ever since.

I started getting paid for this in 1995. Graphic design and websites, back when you did all of it yourself. You drew the artwork, you hand-wrote the HTML, and you understood the server it sat on because there was nobody to hand it to. In the late '90s I owned Tour.com and built travel search, which at the time meant building most of the index yourself too.

Video came out of the same era. Tourism sells on video, so I learned to shoot and cut it, and that turned into a second line of work: training video for the Louisiana Department of Health, and later for several pharmaceutical companies that needed complicated procedures explained to people who didn't have time to read a binder. A lot of what I know about explaining things plainly comes from years of making a nurse or a sales rep understand something in six minutes.

The network side came the same way, because somebody had to do it. Warehouses and office buildings, T1 and ISDN lines, Windows NT. A lot of years went into migrations, moving businesses from systems that were quietly failing onto ones that worked, always while they stayed open and kept taking orders.

Outside the computers I've run a lot of different businesses, held a residential contractor's license, and taught art and photography. That's less a résumé than a list of things I got curious about, but it's the reason that when you tell me about your business I'm hearing the payroll and the margins underneath it, not just the software.

It's also why I'm excited about this era rather than nervous about it. I've been through enough of these cycles to know the difference between a fad and a real tool. This one is real. It's just still a tool, and the last 20% of every build is still a person's job.

Background

First machine
Commodore 64, age 5, BASIC
Then
Apple IIgs, Mac, PC
Professional
Since 1995 — design and web development
Video
Training video for the Louisiana Department of Health and several pharmaceutical companies
Infrastructure
T1, ISDN, Windows NT, token ring and coax migrations
Also
Licensed residential contractor; taught art and photography
Business
Owner and operator; advisor to small businesses
The team

There are six of us.

Two people who run the operation, four who build. Small enough that the person you talk to is the person doing the work.

RN
New Orleans

Ryan North

Founder

Thirty years of design, web, video, and infrastructure. Reads the P&L under your software. Full story above.

LS
Florida

Lindsey Steel

Operations & client delivery

Lindsey spent twelve years as a teacher and program director in early education, running classrooms and then a multi-site preschool program before moving into operations. She runs onboarding, scheduling, and the parts of a project where somebody has to keep a lot of people honest about dates. If you've ever wondered why our scopes are written in plain English, that's her.

MD
New Orleans

Marcus Delacroix

Principal engineer

Marcus has spent twenty years writing production software, most of it high-volume backend systems for logistics and healthcare billing. He's the person who asks what happens when the queue backs up, and he's usually right about the answer. Owns architecture reviews and the parts of a build that touch money.

RM
Utah

Ryan Alan M., PhD

Backend & data systems

Ryan holds a PhD in computer science with a focus on concurrent database systems, and spent years in research before deciding he'd rather ship. He handles data integrity, migrations against live data, and idempotent payment flows. The last-mile list on the home page is mostly his checklist.

DO
Austin

Dana Okafor

Infrastructure & security

Dana came up through platform teams at two large SaaS companies, running the on-call rotation for systems with millions of users. Kubernetes, observability, and the boring, essential work of making sure the thing you can see at 2 a.m. is the thing that's actually wrong.

TM
Austin

Theo Marsh

Frontend & mobile

Theo builds the parts people touch: React, React Native, and the design systems that keep them consistent. Fifteen years in, with a habit of profiling before styling. He's also the reason our accessibility audits come back clean.

Florida
Operations
New Orleans
Founder, engineering
Austin
Development
Utah
Development

Tell us whatyou're trying to do.

We'll look at your business first and tell you honestly whether we're the right fit for it. That conversation doesn't cost anything.

hello@lightwelldevelopment.com