Two firms, on purpose
One decides what to do. The other does it. You are never obligated to turn a plan into a build with us.
Advisory and build, kept apart
Most firms that diagnose your problem also want to win the work that follows. That pulls the advice toward the most expensive option. We split the two so it cannot.
Berube Consulting is the advisory practice. It is where the diagnosis and the plan come from. Durable Programming is the implementation arm — a small senior team that builds and fixes software once a direction is set.
They are separate entities by design. The diagnosis you pay for stands on its own and is not a setup for an upsell. The plan is yours to take anywhere.
Diagnose, plan, and — only if you choose — build
Diagnose
Berube ConsultingA database that has hit a wall, a production system misbehaving in ways nobody can reproduce, a codebase that has outgrown the team. You work with David directly to understand what is actually wrong — not a junior assigned to your account.
Plan
Berube ConsultingYou get a plan grounded in real constraints, with the trade-offs named and more than one option on the table. If the right answer is to repair rather than rebuild, or to keep the system you have, you will hear that too.
Build (optional)
Durable ProgrammingWhen the plan calls for hands-on work, Durable Programming can implement it — a senior team that already understands the problem, with no re-discovery. Or you take the plan to your own team, or anyone else. That choice is yours.
Honest counsel, including “don’t build that”
Independent advice is worth paying for precisely because it is not steered toward the most expensive option. Because the advisory side does not depend on winning the build, the recommendation is the one that actually serves the system — repair instead of rebuild, a configuration change instead of a project, sometimes nothing at all.
That balance is how David writes, too: trade-offs acknowledged, limitations admitted, more than one way to solve a problem presented. The consulting works the same way.
The track record behind the advice
Before an organization hands someone its most important broken system, it wants evidence that person has operated at that scale. David co-founded Casting Frontier in 2006 and led its technology through the 2020 acquisition by Talent Systems, the category leader. He architected the platform behind a database of 800,000+ actors — one of the largest casting databases in the world — used directly or indirectly by virtually the entire Fortune 100, from AstraZeneca to Walmart.
The mechanism is simple: anyone casting actors for a national ad campaign ran on the platform, usually through their agency. That is the credibility on the other side of the table you would now be advising.
Who this is for
- Teams facing an acute, high-stakes problem: a performance crisis, a mysterious production failure, a system nobody fully understands.
- Organizations weighing an expensive decision — rebuild or repair, migrate or stay — where getting it wrong costs heavily.
- Teams that have a plan or a clear problem and need senior hands to execute it well.
- Anyone modernizing a system they cannot afford to break, who wants an incremental path rather than a rewrite.
Who it’s not for
- Anyone shopping purely on price or hourly rate.
- Projects that need a throwaway prototype by Friday with no concern for what happens after.
- Routine, preventative maintenance sold cold — that is not the problem this practice is shaped to solve.
- Work outside David’s areas of genuine expertise — he will tell you, and point you somewhere better.