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Minneapolis, 1950-something — cursor near the wordmark, the plates separate

Everything in black and white. Until it matters.

Dead North is the studio of Dane Petersen: web platforms, commerce systems, and infrastructure that holds under weight. Minnesota-built, working everywhere.

Fifteen years deep in Drupal and the stack around it — migrations that land with every record intact, checkouts that don't drop orders, caching that makes the whole thing feel instant. The launch is opening night. The run is the show.

CH 01Selected workthree of them, chosen

Things that have to work

The house principles: improvise where you can, rehearse where you must, and take care of the people in the room. A short list on purpose — work worth talking about beats a wall of thumbnails.

  1. CH 012026

    V.I.N.CENT

    Design + build

    A fleet-monitoring platform watching 327 production sites — statistical anomaly detection against each site’s own history, an archive of what the host discards, and one rule everywhere: an unchecked site must never look healthy.

    • Drupal 11
    • Next.js
    • Pantheon
  2. CH 022025–

    Enhanced Taxonomy Manager

    Open source — creator & maintainer

    A replacement for Drupal core’s taxonomy UI, built for vocabularies from a dozen terms to 100,000 — drag-and-drop, undo history, bulk merge and clone. Running on 90+ production sites by drupal.org’s own count.

    • Drupal 10/11
    • Vanilla JS
    • SortableJS
  3. CH 032025

    Placeholder — platform migration

    Architecture

    Structure only. Same rule — lead with the problem, not the tech. The stack list underneath is where the tools go.

    • Drupal 11
    • Cloudflare
CH 02Practicehow the work runs
DEAD NORTHA TWIN CITIES TRANSMISSION · CH 00 · IN NOIR-O-VISION

The Twin Cities, in noir-o-vision — hover to lock the signal

Color is an event, not a default.

Her dress is the only color in the frame, and that is a design rule with a working life: spend attention in exactly one place and keep everything around it quiet.

Available for platform work, commerce builds, migrations, and the diagnostic engagements where somebody needs to find out why a site got slow. Small enough to answer the phone, old enough to have already made the mistake.

CH 03Signalstart here

Start the next thing

A build, a rebuild, a program, extra hands — describe it roughly, and rough is enough to get a real answer rather than a discovery call. Or skip the form:hello@deadnorth.io