Studio
Two developers in Riga, trading as SIA FqvB
mbranch is the name on the work. SIA FqvB is the name on the invoice. There is nothing else behind either of them, which is the point.
We started mbranch because we kept meeting the same company: one that had paid a competent agency, received something that worked on the day it was delivered, and then watched it slowly become unmaintainable because the people who wrote it had moved on to the next account.
The name comes from the habit rather than the other way round. Every piece of work is a branch off main, read by the other one of us, and merged only when it is something we would both be willing to explain later. It is not a methodology. It is just the smallest process that has kept us out of trouble.
We take on a small number of projects a year. That is not an exclusivity pitch. It is arithmetic: two people, and a commitment that the person who wrote a piece of code is still around to fix it. If we are full we will say so, and if we know somebody better suited we will point you at them.
Both of us write code every working day. Neither of us has ever wanted to run the kind of studio where that stops being true.
Company details
- Trading name
- mbranch
- Legal entity
- SIA FqvB
- Registered
- Riga, Latvia
- Reg. No.
- [add number]
- VAT
- [add VAT number]
- Contact
- hello@mbranch.lv
The people
Both of us work on everything
There is no bench, no delivery manager and nobody you meet once and never hear from again.
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Emils Gustavs Sangovics
Lead Developer
Emils owns the architecture and writes most of what touches money, sessions, and data you cannot afford to lose twice. He is the one who argues for the boring solution when a clever one is on the table, on the grounds that the boring one will still be legible in three years.
He runs the client relationship as well, so the estimate you are given comes from the person who has to meet it. If you book a call, this is who you are speaking to.
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Georgiy Furanets
Junior Developer
Georgiy came in on the Ozo Golf build and stayed. He handles interface work, test coverage, and the unglamorous parts of a release that quietly decide how Monday morning goes.
He also reviews every pull request Emils opens. That was his condition and it has caught more than it has cost. Junior is a statement about years, not about how much of the product he is trusted with.
How we work
Five things we hold to
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Nothing ships that only one of us understands
Every change is read by the other. It is slower on the day and much faster in the second year.
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Bad news travels first
If an estimate is wrong you hear it the week we know, not at the deadline. This has cost us work and we still do it.
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Boring technology unless there is a reason
PostgreSQL, TypeScript, a server. We reach for something newer when the problem demands it, not when the conference talk was good.
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Your data stays in the EU
Default hosting is European, backups included. If you need something else we will discuss it, but the default is the safe one.
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Every project ends in a handover
Written as though we are leaving, whether or not we are. Nobody should be tied to us by ignorance of their own system.
Next step
Thirty minutes on a call tells you more
than any proposal document will.
Bring the problem in whatever shape it is in. Half a spec, a spreadsheet that has outgrown itself, a codebase nobody wants to open. We will tell you what we would do first, and whether we are the right people to do it.
- No sales call, you speak to the developers
- Thirty minutes, video or phone
- A written summary from us within two days
- We say no when the fit is wrong