About
Technology with a human face.
Makeko is a small technology company in New York. We have kept it small on purpose, and for most of our history we have not advertised at all — the work has arrived through people we have worked with telling other people about it.
Why this site exists now
For years, word of mouth was enough, and a company website felt like something we owed nobody. Then organisations started arriving who had heard the name but had no way to find out what we actually do — which is an awkward position for a technology company to be in. So: this.
It is deliberately plain. It loads fast, it works without JavaScript, it is structured so that both search engines and answer engines can read it correctly, and it uses the same techniques we would apply to your site. It seemed the least we could do.
What we are good at
The range of our work looks scattered from outside — search optimisation, AI adoption and Slurm clusters do not obviously belong in the same company. What connects them is that they are all cases where somebody needs a system built or fixed properly and does not want to assemble a committee of vendors to get it done.
Being small is what makes that possible. There is no account layer, no handoff from the person who understood your problem to the person who implements it, and no incentive to inflate a project into something bigger than it needs to be.
We build our own tools
Two of them do a lot of the heavy lifting. Equipe is a PHP and MySQL framework we wrote for building data-driven websites, intranets and applications — it is what our site builder is based on. Our site audit tool crawls a whole site, proves what is wrong with a deterministic parser, and then has four independent AI models argue about what to fix first.
We build them because the alternatives did not do what we needed, and maintaining them means that when something is missing we add it, rather than filing a feature request and waiting.
How we like to work
- Say what a thing will cost, and then charge that.
- Build things clients can leave. Standard tools, documented setups, exportable data.
- Be honest about fit. If we are the wrong people for a job, better to say so in week one than month six.
- Stay reachable. The person who built it is the person who answers when it breaks.