About Durable Programming
The Story of Durable
Our Story
David Berube has been writing software since the early nineties — and selling it since before he was ten years old. Durable Programming is the firm he built around a pattern he kept seeing after the acquisition of Casting Frontier in 2020: companies that had grown past their tools, duct-taping SaaS products together instead of building infrastructure that actually fit.
Durable Programming is a microagency — fewer than ten people, each carefully chosen. Clients work directly with David as their technical and business point of contact. No account managers, no layers between you and the people solving your problem.
We work with 10–500 person companies who have hit the ceiling on their generic SaaS stack. When a tool that worked at ten employees stops working at a hundred, that's the problem we're built to fix.
The work that gets more valuable as AI gets better
AI can write a function. It cannot walk into a 500,000-line system that’s falling over in production and work out why. Reading an unfamiliar codebase quickly, troubleshooting a complex system under load, telling a slow query from a schema problem — these depend on senior human judgment, and they’re the corner of the market least exposed to automation.
That’s squarely where David’s strengths sit: database performance, troubleshooting large complex systems, and an unusual ability to comprehend codebases nobody fully understands anymore. As routine coding gets cheaper, that kind of expertise gets more valuable, not less — and it’s the kind we lead with.
Our Journey
Founded
Started as Berube Consulting, focusing on software development and consulting services.
Casting Frontier Founded
As one of three founding partners, helped create Casting Frontier, a SaaS platform connecting actors with casting directors, built on a database of 800,000+ actors — one of the largest casting databases in the world.
Practical Ruby Gems
Published "Practical Ruby Gems", a comprehensive guide to Ruby gems and package management.
Practical Rails Plugins
Published "Practical Rails Plugins", exploring Rails plugin development and integration.
MySQL Conference Speaker
Presented "High Performance Ruby on Rails and MySQL" at the MySQL Conference, sharing expertise in optimizing web applications.
Percona Live Speaker
Presented "Increasing MySQL Performance through Aggressive Data Archiving" at Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo.
Database Design Speaker
Presented "Improving Your Database Designs with Practical Database Theory" at Percona Live.
Casting Frontier Acquired
Casting Frontier was acquired by Talent Systems, the category leader, after 14 years of growth.
Durable Programming
Split into separate consulting and software development divisions, establishing Durable Programming.
Field authority
David has spent 20+ years freelancing and consulting in software development. He has written several books on the subject, including Practical Ruby Gems (Apress), spoken at international conferences, and published articles distributed in 65+ countries through outlets like Linux Magazine, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, ADMIN Magazine, and PHP International Magazine.
The range is wide on purpose — over the years that work has spanned everything from Ivy League universities to small specialty businesses. The common thread is judgment built from having seen a lot of systems succeed and fail.
How We Work
Every engagement starts with an honest assessment. Sometimes the right answer is a different SaaS tool, or a configuration change, or nothing at all. We'll tell you that. When custom software is the right call, we build it to last — not to require a rewrite in three years.
We're based in New Hampshire, about an hour north of Boston. When you reach out, you talk to David — not a salesperson, not a project coordinator. A developer and businessperson who's been doing this for over two decades.