The ladder here got climbed in reverse: twenty-four years on national broadcasters, regulated healthcare systems and a global consultancy first — then all of it pointed at the organizations that are normally priced out of that standard.
Small enough that you deal with the person doing the work. Experienced enough that the work holds up.
Four stretches of work, in order, each one the reason the next was possible. The archive below goes wider — a documented selection rather than the whole of it, small projects included.
76 projects, 80 technologies and 34 documented skills — a documented selection, filterable by service line, era and skill
To bring the standards of enterprise digital practice—accessibility, security, sound architecture, honest estimating—to the organizations that are normally priced out of them.
A web that works for the people it currently fails, built by practitioners who leave their clients more independent than they found them.
Four commitments, each one visible in the work rather than only stated here.
A prison visitation guide for families. A community archive for people whose history was never catalogued. Free coding for kids. The web routinely underserves these audiences—so building well for them is the point, not a nice-to-have bolted on at the end.
Software should outlast the person who wrote it. That means boring, maintainable choices over clever ones, documentation written as the work goes, and a handover you can keep running on your own. Some of these systems have been in service for over a decade.
The goal is a client who needs this practice less over time. That means owning your own domains, accounts and source code, no proprietary lock-in, and enough knowledge transfer that walking away is always a live option. Retainers should be a choice, never a trap.
Accessibility audits, security review, proper architecture and honest estimating are normal at organizations with budgets and rare everywhere else. These standards were learned at national scale, and they arrive unchanged at a coffee shop or a two-person nonprofit.
Les Lakewood, Founder
Les has been building for the web since 2002. He led front-end teams on citizen-journalism and broadcast platforms for CTV / Bell Media, CBC and Canoe.ca, then spent years as a senior developer on large regulated systems— eHealth Ontario, Livingston International—before joining EY as Associate Director of Technology Strategy and Web Application Development.
At EY he built a WCAG 2.1 AA audit and remediation practice for enterprise clients, and delivered digital work for national and provincial government. That experience is the whole basis of this company: the same standards, applied to organizations that could never normally afford them.
The Variables Co. is deliberately small. You work with the person doing the work, and everything above is dated and attributed in the career archive.
Launching something new, fixing something broken, or trying to work out which of the two you have. Twenty minutes on a call is usually enough to tell.
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