A small, self-hosted engineering company. The work is randomness, cryptography, software-defined radio, and Rust.
Two divisions. Essex Signal does RF and SDR, and is where RandomWorks lives. Essex Compute does hosting, on hardware in a rack we can walk to.
How we build
Decisions should look as appropriate in twenty years as they do today. That rules out most of what a company this size is expected to do — no trend-chasing, no rewriting the stack every eighteen months, and no dependency taken on faith.
The reference is a Texas Instruments datasheet: information-dense, utilitarian, and made by people who expected to be held to the numbers. Every element has a purpose. If it does not serve the reader or the content, it goes.
What that looks like in practice
Things are checked rather than asserted. Documentation here has a habit of describing an estate slightly better than the real one, so the tooling verifies its own claims and reports drift — and the changelog records what turned out to be wrong, alongside what was built.
The brand works the same way. The stripe at the top of this page is not a drawing; it is derived from the electromagnetic spectrum by a program, and the derivation is the specification. Vivid colour appears only across the band where light physically is. The rest is ink, because radio has no colour.
Where we are
Methuen, Massachusetts, in Essex County — which is where the name comes from. Not a metaphor.