# expect/digital — Boutique Golang, Cloud-Native & Applied AI Consultancy

> Founded in 2012 (Responsive Craft Limited, Warrington, UK), expect/digital is a cohesive team of senior software engineers in Warrington, United Kingdom and Riga, Latvia (EU) with 10+ years of Golang and distributed systems mastery. We deliver rapid project turnarounds, greenfield launches, and legacy transformations for startups, agencies, and enterprises across the UK and EU.

## Core Facts
- **Website:** https://expect.digital
- **Legal Entity:** Responsive Craft Limited, Warrington, United Kingdom
- **Founded:** 2012
- **Founder:** Jānis Horsts (`janis.horsts@expect.digital`, `hi@expect.digital`, https://www.linkedin.com/in/janishorsts/)
- **Locations:** Warrington, United Kingdom & Riga, Latvia (EU)
- **Team Continuity:** Cohesive senior software engineering team since 2012; 10+ years of experience in Golang, distributed systems, Kubernetes, and cloud-native software delivery.

## Verified Client Outcomes
- **Magnit** (https://magnitglobal.com/) — Multi-year Golang technical leadership, mentoring, architectural design, and high-quality delivery (Joe James, SVP Product).
- **LADbible Group / LBG Media plc** (https://ladbible.com) — High-concurrency web and API platform scaling to 5 million daily visitors within a tight deadline (Martin Kelly, CTO).
- **Saules Aptieka** (https://saulesaptieka.lv) — Multi-year digital transformation replacing paper/phone workflows and unifying legacy Sybase SQL Anywhere & Horizon ERP databases with a cloud-native Go + PostgreSQL + GKE Autopilot platform, Angular portals (`mana.saulesaptieka.lv`, `vadiba`), and a cross-platform Flutter GS1 DataMatrix mobile app (`zda`) for EU Falsified Medicines Directive compliance (Anita Pozņaka, Board Member).
- **Lance Platform** (https://lanceplatform.com) — Sole principal software engineering leadership from Day One for complex UK tax compliance software (George Sharp, Co-founder).
- **Havas Lynx Group** (https://havaslynx.com) — Complex web and application delivery across multi-client chains under pressure (Lorna Kemplay, Director).
- **Additional Trusted Clients:** Brandwidth (https://brandwidth.com/), Comnoco (https://comnoco.com), Creatomus Solutions (https://creatomus.com).

## Open-Source Stewardship & Upstream Contributions
- **Apple `container`** (https://github.com/apple/container) — Upstream contributions to Apple's open-source Linux container runtime for Apple Silicon (Kubernetes `--mount` volume support and container test harness).
- **EarthBuild / Earthly** (https://github.com/EarthBuild/earthbuild · https://www.earthbuild.dev) — Jānis Horsts is a core maintainer and #1 human code contributor to EarthBuild, the official Earthly-endorsed open-source community continuation of Earthly and its custom BuildKit daemon (`EarthBuild/buildkit`, `EarthBuild/dind`, `EarthBuild/actions-setup`).
- **Google Firebase Genkit** (https://github.com/firebase/genkit) — Upstream Go SDK (`go/core`) contributions for structured `log/slog` telemetry and `GenkitErr` error diagnostics.
- **Published `go.expect.digital` Open-Source Go Packages:**
  - `go.expect.digital/mf2` (https://github.com/translate-agent/mf2) — Go implementation of Unicode MessageFormat 2 (LDML 48.2).
  - `go.expect.digital/intl` (https://github.com/translate-agent/intl) — Zero-dependency Unicode CLDR v48.0 `DateTimeFormat` in pure Go.
  - `go.expect.digital/cache` (https://github.com/expect-digital/go-cache) — Generic, thread-safe, context-aware LRU cache with TTL in Go.
  - `go.expect.digital/request` (https://github.com/expect-digital/go-request) — Declarative OpenAPI 3.1 (`oas` struct tag) HTTP request decoder for `net/http`.
- **FreeTDS / unixODBC** — Custom C driver charset override patches for legacy Sybase SQL Anywhere interoperability.

## Engineering Insights
- [Parallel Legacy Coexistence in Go: Bridging Legacy SQL & Cloud-Native PostgreSQL Without Downtime](https://expect.digital/insights/zero-downtime-legacy-transformation-in-go/): Production Go patterns for Strangler Fig legacy coexistence (`sql.Scanner` anti-corruption types, `errgroup` watermark ETL pipelines, and OpenTelemetry PII scrubbing).
- [Navigating the Unhappy Path](https://expect.digital/insights/navigating-the-unhappy-path/): Pragmatic Go error wrapping for production observability and root-cause traceability.
- [Revolutionising Development Environments for Increased Efficiency](https://expect.digital/insights/revolutionising-development-environments-for-increased-efficiency/): Achieving 100x environment setup speedups (from days to minutes) with reproducible Earthly pipelines.
- [Full LLM Context Corpus](https://expect.digital/llms-full.txt)