Small, senior, and accountable. On purpose.
Date Palm Media is a small senior team led by a founder who writes code. That is not a stage we are passing through on the way to being an agency — it is the design.
Why small plus senior beats big
Most software firms scale by adding layers: account managers, project coordinators, offshore benches. Every layer moves the person you talk to further from the person who writes the code, and accountability diffuses along the way. We scale the other direction — by staying small enough that every engagement is handled by senior people, and by using AI tooling to give a small team large-team throughput.
When you engage us, you work with the actual team: Joseph Dattilo and the senior engineers and designers who ship the work. No handoffs to people you have never met. No “we” that secretly means fifty subcontractors.
Engagement grows one honest step at a time
Nobody should have to bet the budget to find out what working with us is like. Each rung is worth having on its own; each earns the next.
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An email
Free, and read by the founder. Tell us what you do, what hurts, and your timeline.
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A conversation
If the note looks like a fit, Joseph replies with questions or a time to talk. Still free; still no scripts.
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Production Blueprint
The bounded first engagement: fixed scope, senior eyes, and a prioritized plan you own — whoever ends up building it.
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Bounded delivery
A defined piece of work from the plan: a prototype rescue, a first system of record, an integration that stops the bleeding.
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Managed delivery
One accountable team owning discovery through production support, engagement after engagement.
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Fractional technical leadership
Senior judgment inside your organization on a standing basis — architecture, hiring, vendor decisions, roadmap.
What an engagement feels like
- Discovery comes first. We learn how your operation actually runs before proposing anything — on-site where it helps, and routinely across mid-Michigan.
- You see working software, not status decks. Regular check-ins are demos of the real thing taking shape.
- The people you meet do the work. Including the founder, who writes code on every engagement.
- You own the result. Your repository, your infrastructure, documented. Leaving us should always be easy — that is what makes staying meaningful.
Agents do real work. Humans keep the gates.
We use AI agents heavily in our own delivery — it is a large part of how a small senior team ships at the pace we do. But every change an agent produces passes through human review before it reaches production, and the systems we build for clients follow the same rule: agents act, humans approve, everything is auditable. We were shipping AI to production in 2018, before the LLM wave; the discipline predates the hype.
If a vendor tells you their AI needs no human gates, they are describing their risk tolerance, not their engineering. Joseph writes about running an agent fleet in production on his engineering site.
Who we are for — and not for
Good fit
- Operational businesses whose workflows outgrew spreadsheets, generic SaaS, or a single developer
- Nontechnical founders with a prototype that needs production ownership
- Teams that need senior technical leadership without a full engineering org
- Production AI agent work that needs approval gates and auditability
Not a fit
- Lowest-bid commodity builds — we will lose that auction on purpose
- Bench staffing or placed headcount — we deliver outcomes, not resumes
- AI-branding exercises with no real workflow behind them
If you are unsure which side you land on, say so in the note — an honest “not a fit, try this instead” costs you one email.