info@evamber.com

Independent technology consultancy  ·  Established 2003

Most software projects are bigger than they need to be.

Evamber is an independent technology consultancy led by Danny Shisler, a CTO and software architect. We find the shortest route from an idea to software that earns its keep, design it properly, and build it with a small senior team. For startups beginning with nothing, and for established organisations with decades of systems already in place.

How we work.

A plan first. Then the smallest team that can build it.

Good software comes from a clear head about what matters, an architecture that fits the problem, and a small number of experienced people who stay close to it. Get those three right and the budget and the timeline tend to look after themselves.

Find what delivers most, soonest

Some clients arrive with a fully worked brief, some with a sketch on the back of an envelope, and plenty with an idea and a deadline. The first job is always the same: work out which part of it will deliver the most value fastest, and start there.

Plan before headcount

A clear architecture and a properly sequenced plan does more for a project than a big team does. We size the team to the plan, and in practice that usually means fewer people than you would expect.

Senior, and close to the work

Danny stays inside the technical decisions, not just the reports about them. Where a project needs expertise the team does not already have, he finds the right specialists, gives them a clear objective, and makes sure their work fits properly into the whole.

Ship early, then keep shipping

Something useful goes live early and gets better from there. Every release teaches you something about the problem that no amount of planning would have, and the value starts compounding while the work is still going on.

What we do.

From the first decision through to the running system.

  • Fractional and consulting CTO
  • Technology strategy and direction
  • Software and cloud architecture
  • Product discovery and requirements
  • Building and leading delivery teams
  • Modernising and extending existing systems
  • Practical AI inside business systems
  • AI-assisted software delivery

Clients come to Evamber with a business goal, a product idea, or a system they want to do more. What they get is the decision-making that turns it into something real: what to build, how it should be put together, who should build it, and in what order.

On AI.

AI earns its place wherever a problem needs judgement or interpretation. The skill is knowing where that is, and where it is not.

Language and vision models are good at exactly the things conventional code has always been bad at. Reading a document and telling you whether it is right. Pulling meaning out of a drawing or a map. Tagging a catalogue the way a person would. Holding a conversation. Going away and researching something on your behalf. Around that, ordinary software carries the workflow, the data, the rules and the audit trail, which is what makes an AI-enabled system trustworthy enough to put in front of a business and keep there.

The same holds for how software gets built. AI now writes a large share of the implementation, and the effect is real: a small, experienced team can deliver in months what would once have taken a large one a year. What makes that dependable rather than merely fast is judgement applied at the right moments. Experienced people own the requirements, the architecture and the security, and stay in the loop at the points where being in the loop actually changes the outcome.

Selected work.

THE FLOORR

CTO

Luxury fashion technology

THE FLOORR came to Danny with an idea. He led the team that built it from nothing into a working platform, where professional stylists curate products from partner retailers for their clients and earn commission on what sells. Luxury retail sets a high bar for how a product feels to use, so the work has meant experimenting, refining and reshaping the experience continuously while building serious engineering underneath it: dozens of retailer catalogues ingested, every click tracked through to a sale, and commission attributed, split and paid out across currencies. Danny hires and leads the engineers and product people who build it, scaling the team to whatever the work needs.

Severn Trent

Technical direction

Property Solutions and Data Portal

Danny’s longest-running client relationship. He built Severn Trent’s first website in 2001, returned in 2007 to begin automating the operation, and has led the technology continuously since 2012, now across both of the companies that run it. The platform produces the water and drainage searches solicitors order whenever a property changes hands, and it has handled millions of complex orders. The long arc of the work has been automation: what once needed a substantial team of technicians producing searches by hand now largely completes on its own, and the current programme extends that with machine learning and AI.

TagMix

CTO

Music technology

Danny recruited and led the international product and engineering team that built TagMix, and owned the technical direction and delivery of the entire platform. It lets artists, DJs, festivals, venues and conferences publish professional-sounding video from a live show while the show is still going on. A device on the sound desk captures the audio, the cloud fingerprints it, and clips filmed on the floor come back seconds later synced to it. Good sound is the difference between a clip people scroll past and one they share, and the technology behind it is patented.

Crowdmix

CTO

Music technology

A global music social network, built from nothing. Danny recruited and led a team of around seventy-five people, fifty of them engineers, with the bulk of that hiring done inside twelve months and a high quality bar held throughout. They delivered a massively scalable microservice platform, iOS and Android apps, partner and management tools, and integrations across a range of complex third-party services. The hardest problems went to the data science team and produced a significant body of intellectual property, including two patent submissions.

Danny has led technology teams in telecoms, finance, property, fashion and ecommerce, including a couple of years at Ralph Lauren, and has spent many years working in music and in legal technology.

Who you would
be working with.

An engineer who became a CTO, and never stopped being an engineer.

Danny Shisler wrote software professionally for years before he led anyone, and he still reads the code, reviews the architecture and digs into the hard problems himself. That is what makes the commercial advice worth having: it is grounded in what the system will actually do.

He has led at both ends of the range, from large engineering organisations to teams of two. What he enjoys most is being there at the start, when an idea still has to be turned into something real, and helping to realise it. What starts small often becomes established and needs a bigger team around it, and that suits him too. Evamber has been trading since 2003.

Get in touch.

Tell us what you are trying to build.

The most useful first step is usually a conversation about what you want to achieve, well before anyone writes a specification. An idea, a product that needs building, a system you have outgrown: all good places to start.