About
A small studio, with a long apprenticeship.
Digital Smiddy is a founder-led software business based in Moray, working with clients across Scotland and the rest of the UK.
The founder is Karol Padiasek. He has spent nearly twenty years as a professional software developer: building websites, business systems, integrations and the infrastructure around them. The practice is deliberately small. Clients speak to the person who will design and write the software.
The name is the Scots word for a blacksmith’s workshop. It is a reminder about the standard of the work, not a theme for the website. Useful tools, sound joints, and nothing added for show.
Karol’s background is in mathematics and computer science, followed by commercial web development from the mid-2000s: content sites and e-commerce, then marketplace and product work, lead engineering on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, and contract work across APIs, cloud infrastructure and automation. Alongside client work he designs larger independent systems, which is where much of the real-time and distributed architecture experience comes from.
Digital Smiddy is a trading name of Design Forge Ltd. There is no large delivery team behind the name, and the site will not pretend otherwise. For a website, that means you are not passed between a salesperson and a junior build. For a more complex system, it means the architecture and the code come from someone who has been responsible for both.
- Plain speech Recommendations are made in the language of the business. Technical choices are explained when they matter, and left in the background when they do not.
- Fit over fashion A well-chosen, ordinary tool beats a fashionable one that the business cannot live with. New technology is used when it removes a real constraint.
- Something you can keep The work should still make sense in a few years: documented, deployable, and not dependent on a private trick.