Why it exists
My day job has, for the last fifteen-odd years, been heads-down in voice infrastructure — building and running the bits of telephony that organisations rely on. But the work I find most fun is the awkward stuff: a venue that needs a lighting rig run by an iPad, a small business with a Wednesday-night data-entry shift that should have been automated five years ago, a friend with a SIP problem that “shouldn't even be a problem”.
addedPIXELS is where that work lives. It started in 2014 as a vehicle for the things I was doing on the side anyway — getting a name on the invoice, splitting it off from my employer's remit, and giving the projects somewhere to grow.
It is genuinely small, and stays small on purpose. Most projects are billed direct by me with a hand from one other very capable human; nothing is sold by salespeople, nothing is scaled artificially.
What I do under that banner
Roughly the same things I do in the day job, but for clients rather than an employer — and usually with more freedom to choose the right tool.
- Voice & telephony. SIP carrier work, Asterisk, Kamailio, WebRTC, the WebSocket-secure softphone you didn't know you needed.
- Bespoke software. Custom middleware and small platforms that end the integration headache. Vanilla PHP, a sprinkle of modern PHP, Python where it fits.
- Infrastructure. Linux, bare-metal, VPS, Docker. Mostly Hetzner; almost never AWS.
- Hardware integration. Lighting rigs, DMX, access control, EPOS, the boxes that need to talk to other boxes.
- Consulting. Half a day, a week, a month — architecture reviews, second opinions on a SIP carrier mess, “is this actually broken?” conversations.
The rule
If a project conflicts with my day job, it doesn't happen. Everything else is fair game.