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Studio · Leeds · Engineering only
Canarlo runs from a dedicated office in Leeds. No coworking theatre, no account-manager layer, no handoff from sales to delivery. The tools are deliberate, the code is mine, and the person on the call is the person doing the work.
The office
A dedicated office unit in Leeds. Standing desk, fast connection, whiteboard, no foot traffic. The room exists for one thing: writing software that compounds.
Calls happen here, not in coffee shops. Screens stay clean enough to share without warning. The whiteboard gets used. The phone is on silent. Most days, the only interruption is the doorbell.
Leeds is the home base, but the studio is built to work with founders anywhere — London, the US, Australia. Async by default; synchronous when the work needs it.
Founder · Engineer
Christian Gibbs
15+ years · Founder-engineer · Leeds
The engineer
I came up through the unglamorous half of the web: WordPress builds that had to survive launch day, ecommerce systems that had to take real money, SEO programmes that had to move real revenue. The systems that ship to actual customers, not the ones that ship to a portfolio.
Full-stack, depth-first. TypeScript, Postgres and Next.js are the daily tools, but underneath that is fifteen years of stack-jumping — PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, plus the surrounding apparatus: caching, queues, search, observability, CDN, DNS, the lot. The breadth is on purpose. A system fails at the seams, and you can only design good seams if you have lived in every layer.
I run a wide bench of personal projects between client work — a code generator, a black-hole emulator, a knowledge-graph tool, a research pipeline. They are not client-facing products. They are how I keep the edges of the craft sharp, and several of them have folded back into Canarlo.
The studio exists because I want to choose the work, choose the tools, and choose the people. Independence is the actual product. Forge is what I built so independence was affordable for the client too.
Senior engineer, on every call, on every commit.
The tools
Language
End-to-end. The schema, the server actions, the SDK, the React components, the validators. One type system, one source of truth, no API drift between layers.
Database
Per-row security at the database, not in the page that renders the list. Migrations are versioned. The schema is the design document.
Framework
App Router, server components, edge-cached reads, server actions for writes. Supabase for auth, storage and Postgres. Vercel for delivery. Boring, fast, well-understood.
Testing
Unit and structural tests in Vitest. Browser flows in Playwright. Load and security regressions in k6. Every build runs the full battery before it ships.
AI in the loop
Claude is a working tool, not a feature. Used to draft tests, audit migrations, generate boilerplate, and review diffs. Never used to write production code without a name on the commit.
Generator
An internal code generator that assembles the table-stakes platform — auth, RLS, payments, search, SDK, sitemaps, structured data — from a typed configuration. The reason a £50k build does what a £100k+ hand-written build does.
Visiting
The studio is at Airedale House in Leeds. 24/7 access, free parking, meeting-room access, drinks on site, hotels close by for clients travelling in.
Most work runs async. When a build benefits from a proper working session — discovery, architecture mapping, launch planning, or a focused sprint day — the room is here for it.
Engaging the studio
The way Canarlo ships a serious product in weeks instead of months has a name — Forge — and a long write-up. Worth reading before the call.