About us - A small studio, built like its software
Longship Solutions is a web application development studio in the Selle Valley of North Idaho. We keep the studio the way we keep our codebases: small, focused, and free of parts that don’t earn their place.
The longship was the most effective vessel of its age not because it was complicated, but because it wasn’t. One hull. One sail. Light enough to portage, strong enough for open water. Every plank had a reason to be there.
That’s the standard we hold software to. We work with a small, proven stack — Ruby and Rails, Go, React — and we choose the boring, durable option at every fork in the road. The result is software that’s fast to build, cheap to run, and still comprehensible years later, when it matters most.
The studio is run by Aaron Norling from the Selle Valley, north of Sandpoint, Idaho. Much of our work is open source — you can read it end to end on GitHub — and the rest are products we build and operate ourselves, like viaqr.com.
Our values - What the water teaches
Movement without noise. Power without complication. The brand mark is three waves; the values are about that simple.
- Simplicity. Every dependency, abstraction, and service has to earn its place. The best part is the one that isn’t there.
- Craft. We read the source. We write things down. We leave codebases the way we’d want to find them.
- Candor. Plain language about scope, cost, and trade-offs — including the times when the right answer is to build less.
Where we are - The Selle Valley, North Idaho
We build from the Selle Valley, just north of Sandpoint — between the Selkirk and Cabinet mountains, a few minutes from Lake Pend Oreille. The water in the logo isn’t a metaphor we had to go looking for. We work with clients everywhere; the timezone is Pacific and the inbox is always open.