build is the design and development practice of field15. We’ve been making software since 1998. That’s long enough to watch a lot of “inevitable” futures show up and quietly not pan out, and long enough to learn which questions are worth asking before anyone starts building. This is the part where we tell you who we are.
We started in 1998,building some of the first websitesa lot of our clients had ever seen.
We started in 1998, building some of the first websites a lot of our clients had ever seen.
Every few years since, the industry has handed us the next inevitable thing — the cloud, mobile, big data, now AI — and we’ve asked the same two questions about each one. Is it real? And is it right for the person sitting across from us?
After enough of those cycles, you stop getting swept up in the answer everyone wants to hear. You learn to look past the pitch to the thing someone actually needs. Sometimes that’s the shiny new tool. More often it’s something quieter and more boring that simply works, year after year, without drama.
Either way, the job has never really changed. Understand the problem first. Reach for the technology second. That idea is older than any framework we use, and it’s the one thing about us that hasn’t moved.
One line that became a V.
One line that became a V.
For most of our history, field15 and build were the same thing. One practice, designing and building software for the people who hired us.
In the late 20-teens, that line started to fork. field15 began making things of its own — products, publications, whole communities — and taking on work that reached well beyond software. The single straight line became a V.
build is one arm of that V. It’s the original practice, still doing exactly what it always did: sitting down with someone who has a problem and building them a way through it. field15 is the larger story now, the umbrella over everything we make and everyone we help. build is the part of it you hire to build.
We think the fork made both arms stronger. field15 turned into build’s most demanding client, and everything we learn making our own things goes straight back into the work we do for yours.
The same side of the table.
The same side of the table.
field15 is led by Dave and Catharine Rankin, who are partners in business and in life. That tells you something about how we work. We’ve never drawn hard lines between colleagues, partners, and clients. The good ones all seem to end up on the same side of the table anyway, working the same problem together.
The team you’ll actually work with is small and senior, and it doesn’t get swapped out on you halfway through. Behind it is a deeper bench, the people we’ve built alongside for decades, most of them a quarter-century or more into the craft. It’s the reason we can say yes to strange, hard, interesting work and mean it.
We’re also picky, and we’ll admit it. We’ve turned down projects we knew we couldn’t do justice, and we’ve pointed people toward other teams when that was the honest answer. The other side of that coin is what happens when we do say yes. We’re choosing you as much as you’re choosing us, and in our experience that’s the only kind of working relationship that really holds up.
Only One Way to Find Out
Only One Way to Find Out
You came here to figure out if we’re the kind of people you’d want in your corner. And the best way to answer that is with a conversation. Tell us what you’re working on and what you hope to achieve, and we’ll tell you honestly whether we think we’re the right people to help you get there.