A small team that stays close to the work.
Our story
Lamp was founded in 2013 with a simple idea: a small team of senior engineers, working closely with a small number of clients, for a long time. No account managers. No rotating team of juniors. Just experienced developers who understand your system because they've been working on it for years.
That idea hasn't changed. We've deliberately stayed small so we can keep doing the work ourselves rather than managing people who do it for us. Four of our clients have been with us for over a decade. The software keeps working, the relationships keep working, and nobody has needed to start again.
The team
Dave Liddament
Director and Software Engineer
Dave has been writing software commercially for over 21 years, across languages including PHP, Java, Python, and JavaScript. He leads Lamp's technical direction and is hands-on with architecture, code, and client work every day.
Outside of Lamp, Dave is an international conference speaker. He's presented at SymfonyCon, the International PHP Conference, PHP UK Conference, phpday, and ConFoo, covering testing strategy, static analysis, code quality, and architecture. His talks focus on practical techniques developers can apply immediately, not abstract theory.
Dave is the author of two open source tools: SARB (Static Analysis Results Baseliner), which makes it possible to introduce static analysis to legacy projects without drowning in historical warnings, and the PHP Language Extensions library, which uses static analysis to enforce additional language features at development time. His packages have been downloaded over a million times.
He also organises PHP-SW, Bristol's PHP meetup.
Tom Borealis
Director and Software Engineer
Tom has 18 years' experience in the web industry, specialising in full-stack development, API design, and DevOps. He works extensively with PHP and JavaScript, with deep experience in Symfony and Laravel.
Before Lamp, Tom spent eight years running Instantiate, his own software consultancy, and before that led a team at the NHS Information Centre supporting the Payment by Results and Referral to Treatment initiatives. That background gives him a perspective that goes beyond code: he understands how technology decisions play out in organisations with real operational pressures.
At Lamp, Tom combines hands-on engineering with business development and client work. He's the person making sure the infrastructure is solid, deployments are safe, and the systems Lamp builds actually perform under real-world load. His focus on automated testing, continuous integration, and clean deployment pipelines is a core part of why Lamp's client platforms stay reliable year after year.
How we work together
Between us, we've spent nearly 40 years building and maintaining commercial software. We've worked across industries, languages, and team structures. We've seen what works long-term and what falls apart.
Having two senior engineers who are both directors means every decision at Lamp carries real accountability. There's no gap between the people making technical choices and the people responsible for the business outcome. When we say we'll own the architecture, we mean it personally.
Start a conversation
Now you know who we are. If you'd like to talk about what we can do for you, the first conversation is exploratory and practical. No obligation, no hard sell.