Software architecture
Domain-Driven Design, clean architecture, and event-driven services on .NET 10 — the structural decisions that decide whether a system is still maintainable in year five.
Software studio · Lisbon, Portugal
We build software with cold precision.
A software studio building systems that have to hold up — enterprise .NET platforms, desktop applications, and the creative tooling we ship alongside them. Engineering-led, deliberately small, accountable end to end.
What we do
Four things, done properly.
We'd rather be excellent at a narrow set of problems than adequate at everything. Here's where we're worth hiring.
Enterprise & desktop apps
Line-of-business systems and native-feeling desktop tools for people who work offline, on locked-down networks, or with data that never leaves the building.
Cloud & delivery
Azure infrastructure and Azure DevOps pipelines that a single developer can reason about at 2am — because sometimes they have to.
Creative tooling
Unity editor extensions, shaders, and audio tools published on the Asset Store. Built for our own projects first, then hardened for everyone else's.
The toolkit
Current, not nostalgic.
The foundation stays boring on purpose. What moves forward, moves forward — we run current .NET in production, not whatever shipped four years ago.
Core
- .NET 10
- C#
- ASP.NET Core
- Entity Framework
- LINQ
- Minimal APIs
Architecture
- DDD
- Clean Architecture
- CQRS
- RabbitMQ
- Microservices
- REST
Data
- SQL Server
- T-SQL
- PL/SQL
- MySQL
- SQLite
- Reporting
Cloud & DevOps
- Azure
- Azure DevOps
- CI/CD pipelines
- Entra ID
- Docker
- Git
Front-end
- JavaScript
- HTML
- CSS
- Blazor
- Electron
Creative
- Unity 2D/3D
- Shaders (HLSL)
- Editor tooling
- Python
Selected work
Shipped, in use, maintained.
Clinical platform architecture
Architecture and delivery for healthcare systems where downtime and bad data have consequences measured in patient care, not revenue. Event-driven .NET services over RabbitMQ, SQL Server, and Azure, held together by DDD boundaries that let the domain change without the whole system moving.
- .NET 10
- RabbitMQ
- SQL Server
- Azure
- DDD
ReqForge
A requirements engineering workbench. Runs as an offline desktop app or as a shared web workspace with single sign-on, backed by the same data model — so an engineer on a plane and a team in the office use one tool, not two.
- Electron
- Node · Express
- SQLite
- Entra ID
- Azure App Service
Lawsuit & debt management system
End-to-end development of a case and debt management platform, including Outlook add-ins that put the system where the lawyers already worked, plus the web services, database infrastructure, and reporting layer behind it.
- C#
- ASP.NET
- Entity Framework
- SQL
- Office Add-ins
Products
Things you can just buy.
Tools built for our own Unity projects, then polished and published for everyone else's.
FlexShader
An advanced stylised shader system for Unity — configurable material effects without hand-writing HLSL for every variation.
Published on the Asset Store
Music Weaver
Music tooling for Unity: layer, transition, and stitch tracks so a soundtrack follows what the player is actually doing.
Published on the Asset Store
ChromaFolders Pro
Colour-coded project folders for the Unity editor. A small thing that stops a large project from becoming unnavigable.
In review
The studio
Hi — I'm Arctic.
Pedro Varela on paperwork, Arctic everywhere else. I'm a software architect and Scrum Master based in Lisbon. By day I design .NET systems for healthcare — the kind where a bad deploy is a clinical problem, not a bad quarter. That work taught me to care about boundaries, correctness, and making systems legible to the next person.
Winterbite started in 2014 as a place to publish games, and it's still where everything I build outside a client contract lives: desktop tools, Unity assets, and the occasional indie project. Before all of this I spent four years in the Portuguese Army as an IT repair technician and network administration assistant — which is where the organisational habits and the unreasonable punctuality come from.
The studio model is deliberately simple: you talk to the person building the thing. No account managers relaying requirements, no discovery phase that outlives the budget. We scope something real, build it, and put it in front of users early enough that being wrong is still cheap.
- Ship small, ship often. A working slice this week beats a perfect plan next quarter.
- Own the whole stack. Code, deploy, and the pager. Handoffs are where quality dies.
- Boring where it counts. Proven tools for the foundation; save the novelty for the product.
- Leave it readable. Whoever picks this up next — including future me — should not suffer.
Track record
-
2022 — present
Software Architect & Scrum Master — Neosoft, Lisbon
Architecture for healthcare applications; leading delivery, CI/CD practice, and DDD adoption across the team.
-
2018 — 2022
Software Developer — AGAP2, Lisbon
Lawsuit and debt management platform: C#/ASP.NET services, Outlook add-ins, SQL infrastructure and reporting.
-
2014 — 2016
Founder & Developer — Winterbite Studios
Unity game development, with titles published to Google Play and itch.io.
-
2012 — 2016
Network Administration Assistant — Portuguese Army
IT repair and network administration. Twice commended for honour and value.
Education
- Postgraduate — Virtualization & Cloud Computing, ISTEC
- BSc — Computer Engineering, ISTEC
- Level 4 — IT Equipment Management, ETP Mafra
Certification
- Scrum Master Accredited Certification
- Project Manager Accredited Certification
- ISO/IEC 20000 IT Service Management Associate
- Six Sigma Yellow Belt · Lean Foundations
Beyond the keyboard
- Portuguese (native) · English (C1)
- Trainer & mentor — military and professional
- Fourteen years of clarinet; six of piano
- Entrepreneurship contest winner, 2011
Get in touch
Got something worth building?
Tell me what you're trying to do and what's currently in the way. If it's a fit I'll say so quickly — and if it isn't, I'll say that too.