Rusware Email Russ

Still running.

One person in Melbourne, building, connecting and hosting business software for 22 years, 191 days and 710,000,000 seconds.

Email Russ What I do
Risograph-style print of an engineer standing calmly in a workshop where every machine, server rack and kettle is running with a small glowing light on.

What I do

Five things, all done by me, start to finish. That is why they fit together.

Build the thing.

Web apps, APIs, back-office systems and trade ordering portals on .NET, Angular and SQL Server. Per-account pricing, approvals, on-account payment, the lot. Designed to still be running in ten years, which is the only benchmark I care about.

Lately: a WooCommerce trade store with contract pricing, wired into the Coads ERP for Metwood.

Print of a craftsman at a workbench fitting gears inside a machine shaped like a web browser window.
Make your systems talk to each other.

ERP to website to accounting to trading partner. Coads, Xero, WooCommerce, EDI, payment gateways. If nobody has the documentation, I read the database and work it out. It is usually in there somewhere.

Lately: electronic document exchange and a Xero integration for COADS, an Australian ERP.

Print of two smiling old desktop computers connected by a tin-can telephone string.
Put AI to work, carefully.

Assistants and agents that work from your own documents and show where every answer came from, built on Claude and OpenAI models. For work where a confident wrong answer costs money.

I founded Cynario, which does exactly this for mortgage brokers across 40+ lender policies. So I know where AI goes wrong, and what it takes to stop it.

Lately: Cynario, every single day.

Print of a boxy robot in reading glasses checking a long document with a magnifying glass, ticking each line.
Host it and keep it running.

Windows, SQL Server, .NET and WordPress hosting on servers I run myself. Monitoring, patching, backups, and small changes without a big invoice. When something breaks at two in the morning, the person who built it gets the alert. The cat is optional.

Lately: online ordering, a website and hosting for Aquarium Industries. A relationship measured in years, not invoices.

Print of a server rack at night with a desk lamp, a mug of tea and a cat asleep on top.
Tell you the truth about your code.

An independent read of software you paid someone else for: what is good, what is dangerous, and what it will really cost to fix. Or I finish the project the last developer walked away from, on whatever stack it is already on.

Lately: a full audit of a live ERP database before anyone wrote a line of new code against it.

Print of a mechanic in overalls holding a stethoscope to a laptop on a hoist, clipboard in hand.
  • .NET since it was new
  • Angular
  • SQL Server
  • AWS
  • Docker
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • Xero
  • PayPal
  • EDI
  • Vector Search
  • Claude
  • OpenAI
  • and whatever yours is written in

Why one person is the right number

Agencies have account managers. I have a phone.

Print of a man at a tidy desk answering a rotary telephone while a very long to-do list unrolls onto the floor.
  1. You talk to the person doing the work.

    There is nobody else to talk to.

  2. The price is the price.

    Fixed where the work allows it, phased where it does not. The invoice is never a surprise.

  3. The code is yours.

    In your repository, from the first commit.

  4. I will say no.

    When you do not need what you are asking for, I will tell you. It happens more than you would think.

  5. I host what I build.

    If it breaks, I find out before you do.

Tell me what’s broken.

Or what you want built. I read every email myself, and I will tell you straight whether I am the right person for it.

Who
Russell Lewis, Director
Where
Melbourne, clients across Australia
Since
30 March 2004
ABN
22 035 207 362