About
The hands behind the work.
Atlantic Forge is one engineer, a trusted designer, and collaborators brought in when a project needs them. This page is about who we are, told the way we prefer: through the work and the tools.
Why this studio exists
Atlantic Forge exists so the work we care about can be done properly: up close, with patience, and with nothing standing between a good idea and the person building it. Most software gets worse as it passes through hands that never meet the person it is for. Keeping the studio small is how we keep the maker and the decision in the same room.
The name is a plain description. The Atlantic is the ocean at our door: deep water, and the long reach that lets a studio on the Portuguese coast serve teams in any time zone. The forge is what happens at the bench: metal worked patiently until it holds, the way we think software should be made. We chose the two ideas we want the work measured against.
One conviction shapes the studio more than any other: AI should be able to run on machines you control. We run local open-weight models through Ollama on our own hardware, and we build the same for clients, so sensitive data never flows through a third-party API. It is a quieter way to build AI, and a more defensible one.
Deus quis que a terra fosse toda uma, Que o mar unisse, já não separasse.
God willed the earth be all one, that the sea unite it, never divide.
The stack, plainly.
We stay largely technology-agnostic: the project's needs come first, then the tools that fit them. These are the ones we reach for most.
Front end
TypeScript across the stack, with Vue and Nuxt, React and Next, or Astro, chosen to fit the project rather than out of habit.
Back end
Python and Django where a mature ecosystem makes the difference, Rust where performance and reliability matter most, and GraphQL for APIs.
AI / ML
Local open-weight models served through Ollama, on hardware we or our clients control. On-premise AI is the studio's core discipline, not an add-on.
3D & interactive
Real-time 3D and WebGL in the browser, for the projects where depth should be something you can move through, not just read about.
Edge & infrastructure
Cloudflare for edge and serverless, and the infrastructure underneath: networks, machines, and the systems that keep them healthy.
The work is the introduction.
Our lab is where the on-premise conviction actually runs: our own machines, on a private network, serving the models we write about. It is the part of the studio we built purely for ourselves.
See the homelabThe rest is best judged directly. The Work page holds what we build for clients; the Lab holds the experiments and tools we build for ourselves.
Browse the workYou will notice there are no names or photographs here. That is the same privacy-first instinct we bring to your data, applied to ourselves. The people are real, and you meet them on the first call.
See how we work