Introducing SwartBerg Studio
Why we started an independent South African software product company, what it builds, and the principles it will be run by.
SwartBerg Studio exists for a simple reason: good software takes patience, and patience is easier to protect when you own the thing you are building.
After eighteen years as a software engineer, I wanted a home for the products I believe in, where each of them can grow at its own pace. That home is SwartBerg Studio, an independent South African software product company built around one platform, C# and .NET, and one way of working: carefully.
What the company is
SwartBerg is a software product company. We design, develop and own software products, developer tools and AI technologies using the Microsoft .NET platform. That means the company:
- designs and develops its own products, from first sketch to store listing;
- owns them outright, and maintains them for the long term.
Every hour goes into products we own, which means the lessons from one feed directly into the next. The libraries we write for one product are the foundations of the one after it.
Where it starts
We start with four products:
- Pictuli, a calm colouring book for children and grown-ups, on phones and tablets.
- An AI training framework written in C#, for training and running models on any modern GPU.
- SharpVault, an open-source password and secrets manager for organisations on Microsoft Entra ID and Azure, developed in the open.
- SwartBerg.Mediator, a high-performance mediator for .NET, published on NuGet.
Others join when they are ready. Each product has an entry on our products page, and its own posts here as it grows.
How it will be run
We wrote our values down before we wrote much else, because it is easier to keep a promise you have made in public. The short version:
Build things we would be proud to maintain in ten years, and say plainly what they will cost.
In practice that means automated tests before confidence, a prototype before a commitment, and saying "we do not know yet" when that is the honest answer. You can read all six values on our about page.
Why the name
The Swartberg is a mountain range in the Western Cape whose sandstone was folded, slowly, over millions of years, into some of the most striking rock formations anywhere. Nothing about it was rushed and nothing about it is fragile. That is the standard we are setting ourselves.
What comes next
Every product keeps growing: Pictuli gains new collections, SharpVault grows feature by feature in public, and the framework and the mediator gain features as the products built on them need them. We write about that work here, including what goes wrong, because that is usually the more useful half of the story.
New ideas are always waiting their turn. Each is tried small first, and the ones that prove themselves become products. What we do explains how that works.
If you have a question about any of our products, we would like to hear from you.