A note on this archive: an earlier version of this site was lost in a migration, with no surviving backup. This piece is a good-faith recreation of our writing from this period, not a recovered original; its date reflects the period it represents. See about this archive.
I've recently taken the helm at sourceBOLD, so a word feels in order — about what this place has been, what carries forward, and where it's headed.
If you've read much of what's here, you know this company began as a Utah software shop that spent the better part of a decade helping companies build with developers who weren't down the hall. I'm writing this as the person stepping into stewardship of what they built. I didn't start it, I have real respect for the people who did, and I have no intention of pretending the story begins with me.
What the founders got right
A few things in this archive have aged remarkably well, and they're worth keeping.
The first is a refusal to compete on being the cheapest. The founders wrote, plainly, that the race to the bottom isn't one worth running — that squeezing the people who do the work buys you turnover and mediocrity, and the client pays for it in the end. I believe that completely. We pay developers well because it's the thing that actually works, not because it photographs nicely.
The second is the conviction that distance was never the real obstacle. Years before it was fashionable — and then, this past year and a half, when it became mandatory for everyone — the argument here was that you can work brilliantly with someone you don't share a room with, if you have the discipline to do it well. The pandemic settled that debate for the whole industry. The teams that thrived weren't the ones with the nicest office; they were the ones who'd learned to measure work by what gets shipped, not by who's visible at their desk.
What carries forward, and what sharpens
So the mission doesn't change: connect companies that need great software with developers who can build it, and treat both sides like the long-term relationship it ought to be.
What sharpens is the focus. A year ago this blog noted that the talent map had been redrawn — that once a role can be done from anywhere, geography stops being the constraint and time-zone overlap becomes the thing that actually matters. That's the observation I want to build the company around. Not developers as far away and as cheap as possible, but senior developers across the Americas, working in or near your hours, joining your team as teammates rather than a vendor you talk to while you're asleep.
That's the thesis, really: the same daylight, senior people, and far less of the overhead that usually comes with engaging talent across a border. The founders pointed at it. I'd like to make it the whole point.
Why now
The timing isn't an accident. The last two years rewired how companies think about where their people sit, and a lot of teams are, right now, rebuilding how they hire from the ground up. The old defaults — everyone local, everyone in the building — quietly stopped being defaults. That's a rare window to build something deliberately, while the assumptions are still loose.
I'll spend the coming posts laying out how we think about the rest of it — vetting, engagement, the economics, the parts most companies get wrong. For now I just wanted to mark the turn honestly: new hands, the same craft, and a clearer idea of where it's pointed.
Thanks for reading. There's more coming.