About
A practice built around one accountable engineer.
Antegrate is a software engineering consultancy. It works on systems that a business depends on and that have become expensive, risky or slow to change.
It is principal-led. Technical ownership stays with Dorian Ben Haim throughout the engagement — discovery, architecture, the decisions that determine whether the work succeeds, implementation oversight, and final acceptance. That accountability is the product, and it is not delegated.
How we think about systems
These views determine what we will recommend — and, more often than clients expect, what we will recommend against.
- Most legacy systems do not need a rewrite.
- The valuable asset in an old system is rarely the code — it is the years of commercial behaviour encoded in it, most of which is undocumented. A rewrite does not port that. It re-derives it, in meetings, from people who will remember it incompletely.
- Framework age is not a reason to modernize. Change cost is.
- A supported stack that is expensive to modify needs work. An old stack that absorbs change cheaply does not. The question is never how old the system is; it is what a change costs and why.
- Moving a bad architecture to the cloud gives you a bad architecture in the cloud.
- On a metered bill. Infrastructure work is worth doing when it reduces the cost of change, and worth refusing when it relocates the problem and calls it progress.
- Systems that fail silently are not stable.
- They are systems whose failures are being discovered by other people — operations staff, or customers. Making failure visible is almost always the cheapest high-value work available.
- Automation is not a strategy if the underlying integration is broken.
- Automating a process built on connections that fail silently produces failures that are now also unattended.
- Code nobody needs to modify is not costing anything.
- Technical debt matters when it creates change cost, not because old things exist. Reducing debt that does not impede change is how modernization programmes consume budget without changing anything the business can feel.
Antegrate is run alongside that role, and takes a small number of engagements at a time.
We would rather state that plainly than have you discover it. It is also the mechanism behind everything on this site that sounds like selectivity: the engagement floor, the willingness to tell a prospect that an assessment is the wrong instrument, the section on the homepage listing the work we are not right for. A practice that needed every deal could not write any of that and mean it.
- Fit is established early
- Work that is clearly not a fit is declined before either side spends time on a scoping process.
- There is no round-the-clock support and none is sold
- Response windows are agreed to match real availability rather than an aspirational SLA.
- Small, commodity work is declined regardless of margin
- It is not a judgement about the work; it is arithmetic about capacity.
On depending on a small firm
The obvious question about a practice this size is what happens if the person running it is unavailable. It is a fair question and it deserves a real answer rather than reassurance.
Antegrate should not create the dependency it is there to remove.
A firm whose central argument is that critical knowledge should not live in one person’s head would be a poor choice if working with it produced exactly that. The operating standard is that the work can be handed back:
- Decisions and their reasoning are written down
- Architecture is documented as it is built, not afterwards
- Deployment and operational steps are scripted, not described
- Your engineers are involved closely enough to maintain and extend the result
If you stopped working with us tomorrow, could your team carry on from what exists?
If the answer is no, the engagement has failed on its own terms regardless of whether the software works.
Who runs it
Antegrate is led by Dorian Ben Haim, who has worked across application development, integration and automation engineering, infrastructure and technical leadership — currently as Head of Development at an insurance technology company, and previously three and a half years at AppsFlyer.
That range matters for one reason. Systems rarely become expensive to change in a single layer: the cause sits across application code, integrations, data, deployment and infrastructure, and a diagnosis limited to one of those produces an investment aimed at the wrong place.
Both are professional background. Neither company is an Antegrate client, and neither endorses this work.