Team

Defined Once is founded and privately owned by us, Elias Groot (left) and Max Gallup (right). During our Computer Science degree at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, we teamed up to represent the VU in the global NXP cup, an autonomous racing competition. It led us to discover our common interest in building systems with rigor and thoroughness. Our investment in fully understanding the systems we build has paid itself off many times since then. We won the cup and supplied a new generation of VU Computer Science students with the fully open source Autonomous Systems Engineering (ASE) software and hardware framework that has allowed many to graduate under our supervision.

Since 2023, we have also been working together on all sorts of client work - from building high-performance Rust integrations to optimizing Kubernetes deployment pipelines. Since the beginning of our studies, we became shockingly aware of the unspoken and often unquestioned dependency on the brittle systems which form the backbone of our digitalized society. The shifting geopolitical balances have exposed this dependency and led us to believe that now is the perfect time to unite and focus on what we do best: (re)building systems in Rust, right here in Europe.

So we launched Defined Once, a boutique consultancy based in Amsterdam. Our mission draws inspiration from the people of Oxide Computer where openness and transparency play a central role. Similarly, our own values form the bedrock of our operations. We treat software as a liability, not an asset, since every line of code must be secured, maintained and eventually read by someone else. The name "Defined Once" is an attempt to capture a mental model that prioritizes longevity by focusing on scrutiny and fastidiousness in the short term.