No signal
awaiting portrait
Exhibit A — Dane Petersen — Minnesota
I'm Dane Petersen — the builder behind Dead North. I make web platforms, commerce systems, and the infrastructure underneath them, and I've been doing it long enough to know that the hard part is never the launch.
The short pitch: building since 2013 — Drupal versions 5 through 11 at the deep end, WordPress and Strapi beside it, AWS (certified) and Azure underneath, Node, .NET, and Python in the drawer, and mobile from native Android to Flutter. The work I like best is the kind that can't fail quietly: the migration that can't lose a record, the checkout that can't drop an order, the site that got slow and nobody knows why.
Dead North is deliberately small: you talk to me, the person doing the work. When a project needs more hands than two, I bring in specialists I trust — and tell you who they are.
Download the résumé (PDF) ↓The Fargo years
Seven years as a software project lead in North Dakota: native mobile apps with GPS in their bones, AWS architecture stood up from nothing, .NET and PHP shipped to real clients. Where "it works on my machine" stopped being an acceptable sentence.
The migration years
Minneapolis agency work as sole technical lead on enterprise Drupal portfolios — including a monolithic Drupal 7 with millions of nodes rebuilt as Drupal 10 with every data relationship intact. Behat tests standardized across the shop, because untested migrations are rumors.
The fleet era
Backend engineering for media properties measured in millions of monthly visits, and V.I.N.CENT — the observability agent watching 300+ production sites so a nine-person team can run enterprise scale without adding headcount.
Dead North
The practice, under its own name. Same hands, fewer layers between you and them. Also, finally, the CS degree — finished at NDSU in 2024, eleven years into the career it describes.
Boring first, psychedelic last
The site you are reading was content-complete before it had a single animation. Builds that start with the shader die in the shader.
Color is an event
The design rule of this site, and a working rule everywhere: spend attention in one place and keep everything around it quiet.
A backup is a rumor until you restore it
Applies to backups, staging environments, disaster plans, and every promise made by a checkbox in an admin panel.
Small enough to answer the phone
You talk to the person doing the work. Old enough to have already made the mistake you are worried about.
Dead North is how a navigator says exactly— dead center, dead ahead, dead north. Aim you can trust. It's also the Dead and the North: a Minnesota practice run on the band's working ethos — rehearse hard, improvise freely, take care of the room. And it's a band, because every good name should also be a band.
Minnesota is the north in question. The dead part means precisely, and it is not negotiable.
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