St.
Contact us

About us - We're Veteran Engineers. Masters of Our Craft.

At Stacktrace, we believe in the power of technology to transform ideas into tangible results. With our expertise in the complete software lifecycle, from discovery and ideation, through development, launch and maintenance, we are committed to protecting our clients' visions while ensuring on-time, on-budget delivery.

Australian software-engineering recruitment is notoriously competitive, so when we opened our doors back in early 2018, we set out to create a software-delivery talent-magnet, where Brisbane's best and brightest would be given the autonomy to create an engineering-led culture, and the chance to learn from experienced developers at the peak of their careers. Each member of our team brings a wealth of experience, and together we're able to provide the full breadth of modern best-practice artificial-intelligence and web-development services.

We can deliver everything from custom software development, infrastructure provisioning, machine-learning and data-analysis, to strategic technology consulting as interim/virtual CTOs.

Years combined experience
80+
Projects Delivered
25+
Data-Security Incidents
0

Our Values - Enterprise delivery with a startup mindset

We challenge ourselves to apply these core beliefs in every endeavor

  • Move quickly, decisions are generally reversible. Autonomy is empowering, and meetings suck. When a decision is reversible without great expense, don't slow down.
  • Explicit is better than implicit. This started as a rule we'd apply in code or technology selection, but we soon realised it applied equally well in supporting difficult conversations. It really thrives in an environment where transparency and curiosity are actively encouraged.
  • Culture eats process for breakfast. No one reads policy documents, who are you kidding? Remember that this swings both ways, and in the absence of detailed policies or mechanisms to ensure consistency of process, you'd better have invested in creating the right culture.
  • Measure things, whenever you can. Or give up on the idea of improving them.
  • Keep a clean workspace. Lower the noise-floor. This is particularly important when considering machine-authored signals like logs and metrics, but it also neatly references WIP limits and other sensible lessons from manufacturing.
  • If something is hard, do it more often. Shout out to James Ottaway for this one. We particularly like applying this principle to infrastructure provisioning and configuration automation. We sometimes take this to extremes, like migrating to a new database schema every night. Really.
  • Be curious, and ask. We're a small team wearing many hats, with a fondness for radical transparency. Everything's fair game.
  • Kindness is better than correctness. Life's too short to work with assholes.
  • Low quality is expensive. So is perfection. Be relentlessly pragmatic. Pragmatism is how you ensure there's some money or time left in the jar when you identify a situation where the extra effort or complexity is justified.
  • Take an investment mindset, then offer tradeoffs. This is the counterpoint to the Reversible Decisions value, and helps to reframe discussions away from tribalism.
  • Earn risk-tokens with boring choices, then place them wisely. Most projects will probably follow our AWS terraform templates, leaning on safe defaults like Postgres, S3 and Redis. A risk-token that paid off nicely for our healthcare platforms was F#, for example.
  • Respect new information. Allow it to change your plans. The core principle of lower-case agile, or the fog-of-war in RTS games, if you're into that sort of thing.

Our Mission - Amplify Human Potential

  • We believe that with a curious mindset towards problems, one which respects the wider context in which people make progress towards their goals, it’s possible to deliver moments of unexpected joy.
  • We believe that these moments can create a virtuous loop, in which our customers, our team and our shareholders all win.
  • We are happy people, creating the best work of our lives.

Leadership

  • Chris Horwill

    Founder

  • Dan Sowter

    Founder

Team

  • Anaru Herbert

    Senior Software Engineer

  • Ben Tefay

    Senior Software Engineer

  • Courtney Sowter

    Senior Software Engineer

  • David Farrow

    Senior Software Engineer

  • James Nguyen

    Senior Software Engineer

  • Josh Smith

    Senior Software Engineer

  • Katie Gray

    Special Projects Lead

  • Patrick Freeman

    Senior Software Engineer

  • Thomas James

    Senior Software Engineer

From the blog

Our team of experienced developers has just one thing on their mind; working on your ideas to draw a smile on the face of your users worldwide.

How do AI Clinical Notes work? - A high level review for clinicians

There has been an explosion in the availability of AI tools that help automatically create clinical notes for doctors and other health practitioners. We give a high level overview of how many of these systems are built to help doctors and other clinicians understand what they are using.

Read more

Comparing and Sorting in Elm

In this short post we will take a peek at how values can be compared and sorted in Elm, with the goal of sorting a List of records using multiple criteria.

Read more

We’d love to accelerate your next project.

Tell us all about it

Our offices

  • Brisbane
    L2, 303 Coronation Drive
    4064, Brisbane, Australia