Bernot Software
One person, in Flagstaff, who builds the thing.
No account manager, no offshore team, no handoff between the person you talked to and the person writing the code.
Hello. I’m Adam Bernot.
I build software for businesses in Flagstaff and around Northern Arizona: web, mobile, and desktop applications, and the unglamorous automation that takes a recurring chore off somebody’s desk for good.
Before I was an engineer, I was the one with the problem. I spent about a decade running operations inside colleges. A director’s job, not a developer’s. Staff, budgets, vendors, and an enormous amount of process held together by spreadsheets and institutional memory. I started writing scripts because my own office was drowning in work nobody should have been doing by hand, and because the software we had already paid for did not do the one thing we actually needed.
That turned into a career. Today my day job is engineering on a major cloud platform, on the infrastructure underneath services used by millions of people. I contribute to Kubernetes, the open-source project a great deal of the modern internet runs on, and I have spoken about that work at KubeCon and GopherCon, the conferences where people who operate systems at that scale compare notes.
Those two halves are the whole pitch. The infrastructure work is why what I build for you will hold up under real use. The decade before it is why I will ask what happens to your process when the person who normally does it is on vacation, and why I am rarely surprised when the answer involves a spreadsheet nobody will admit exists.
Alongside all of that I have taken client work for companies around the country: payroll, gaming and hospitality, cybersecurity, developer platforms. It was good work and I never once saw the office. I am pointing that experience at Flagstaff on purpose. The businesses here have the same problems and almost nobody local who can build the fix.
Bernot Software is deliberately small. I run it alongside that day job and take on a few projects at a time. That is the trade: you will not get a large team or an instant start date, and in exchange you get the person who writes your code sitting across the table, and an honest “you don’t need this” when that is the real answer.
Six commitments, and what they cost me.
Anyone can list values. These are the ones that actually change what I do, including when they are inconvenient.
A fixed price, before anything starts
You get a number and a date in writing. If I estimate badly, that is my problem to absorb, not a change order for you to sign. It means I have to understand the work before quoting it, which is the point.
I build on what I have built before
Most of what a project needs I have written already: document generation, record lookups, the plumbing between systems that will not talk to each other. I keep those pieces and reuse them, which is exactly why your build costs less than starting from nothing.
Your data stays yours
I do not resell it, mine it, or train anything on it. When a job can be done without sending data anywhere at all, that is how I build it. One of my desktop apps handles client records entirely on the user’s own machine, with no server of mine in the picture.
Plain language about AI
AI is genuinely good at drafting text and reading messy input. It is bad at being trusted without review, and it is not a reason to rebuild something that works. I will tell you which of those applies to your idea.
“You don’t need this” is a real answer
Sometimes the honest recommendation is a setting in software you already pay for. I take on a few projects at a time, and I would rather spend one on something you will open every day than on something that quietly goes unused. I have written about how to check.
Close enough to visit
I would rather watch the work happen for an hour than read a requirements document for a week. The best ideas in a project come from noticing the workaround someone built for themselves and never mentioned.
Bernot Software L.L.C.
An Arizona limited liability company, serving Flagstaff, Coconino County, and the communities along the way: Sedona, Williams, Winslow, Cottonwood, and the Verde Valley.
Work happens remotely by default, and on site whenever being in the room is worth more than a video call, which at the start of a project it usually is.
At a glance
- Based in Flagstaff, Arizona
- Organized as an Arizona L.L.C.
- B.S. Computer Science, Western Oregon University
- Kubernetes contributor; KubeCon and GopherCon speaker
- Web, mobile, desktop, and workflow automation
- National client work across payroll, gaming, and security
- Document automation experience, deepest in real estate
- Fixed-price builds, hosted and maintained
Worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, free, and you will get a straight recommendation either way.