Degel Software Ltd. · founded 1988
Your next product, prototyped at AI speed
I’m David Goldfarb — MIT ’84, founder of Degel Software. I do rapid prototyping, technical due diligence, patent guidance, and senior technical judgment — backed by hands-on shipping through every technology wave since 1980. The AI wave is the biggest yet, and I build with it every day.
1980 → 2026 · six technology waves · still shipping
Services
What I do
Four things, done with four decades of judgment and today’s tools.
Rapid prototyping, at AI speed
You have a next-generation idea and a team that can’t be distracted from the current product. I take it from whiteboard to working, demoable software in weeks, using AI wherever it actually helps.
Technical due diligence
Considering an investment, an acquisition, or a rebuild — or wanting an honest, impartial read of your own product before you bet on it? I evaluate technology stacks, architectures, and teams — and tell you what’s really there, with the eye of someone who has built, bought, and retired every generation of them.
Patent & technical IP guidance
I help you find your product’s inventive bits and work alongside your patent attorneys through the whole arc — provisionals, utility applications, office actions, allowance. I’m a named inventor on four US patents myself — I’ve sat on your side of the table.
Senior technical judgment
Mentoring for development teams and their leaders, technology strategy, and the 2 a.m. questions of a first-time founder — aligning technical and business decisions all the way to a successful exit. Engagements can be as light as a single research report: most recently, on transparent, trust-preserving ranking algorithms for a social-discussion platform. I’ve already made most of these mistakes, and shipped anyway.
Track record
A flag on every wave
דגל (degel) is Hebrew for “flag”. I’ve planted one on every technology wave since 1980 — not watching from shore, but shipping commercial software inside each shift.
TCP/IP, Lisp machines & the first AI wave
At MIT in 1980, I worked with the Laboratory for Computer Science team implementing the Internet’s TCP/IP protocols. Then straight into the first AI wave: at Symbolics — maker of the Lisp machine, and holder of the Internet’s first registered domain (symbolics.com, 1985) — I built the Command Processor, parts of the window system, and a Lisp-powered constraint-propagation spreadsheet far ahead of the PC spreadsheets of its day. Then I co-founded International Lisp Associates.
After moving to Israel: image-processing and object-recognition toolkits on Lisp machines for MBT–Israel Aircraft Industries and several AI and CAD startups.
Windows, machine vision & translation
I wrote major portions of a paint and drawing program for NTT, Japan’s telecom giant, and built core components — plus some genuinely advanced C++ — for Cognex machine vision. I ported a commercial machine-translation system to English and Japanese Windows, and wrote medical software that McKesson later acquired. Much of the language-technology work ran through Basis Technology — a client relationship that continues to this day.
The first Internet boom
I co-founded 2AM Inc. as VP Technology and directed its core Creation engine — the scripting and runtime environment for a massively distributed, peer-to-peer game platform that served over 250,000 users in the dial-up era.
Mobile, before the iPhone
I ported Sun’s J2ME runtime to the first Symbian smartphones, built ICQ’s and AOL’s mobile messaging clients, and created Orange UK’s push-to-talk client. We shipped dozens of Symbian and J2ME apps — including a Nokia 9210 device driver that Nokia said couldn’t be written (we wrote it), and portions of QuickOffice, which Google later acquired and folded into Google Docs.
Symbian named Degel a Platinum Partner, and Degel-built apps took home Handango Champion awards in 2003 and 2004. I co-founded Vringo as CTO, steered its mobile products through the arrival of the modern smartphone, and helped guide it to an NYSE IPO.
The modern web & NLP
Full-stack product work for startups and established clients — including a Clojure-based biological-computation system for the National University of Singapore. As Principal Software Engineer at Basis Technology, I designed and built the Adaptation Studio and Identity Studio NLP front ends. I also pushed the company into ChatGPT and LLM techniques early — my on-ramp to the next wave.
AI-augmented development
I work inside this one daily. Most of that time goes to MarketBuzzr — I’m co-founder and technical lead, building its multi-stage LLM pipeline and the product around it — and to the client work below: workflow automation, operations software, LLM-first prototypes.
The fun spills into weekends. One produced a 13,000-line Scheme interpreter in Rust — a language I’d never used — passing all 1,225 tests of the standard conformance suite; the next, a Z80 and CP/M emulator that boots the genuine 1979 operating system and runs Zork, WordStar, Turbo Pascal, and many other great applications from back then.
Portfolio
Recent work
Co-founder and technical lead of MarketBuzzr, which tracks your competitors, industry, and market conversations — and turns the flood into a short, role-tailored read with drafts you can actually send. I built the multi-stage LLM pipeline at its core and the product around it, concept to working MVP.
AI-driven workflow automation for a working patent practice — internal tooling that streamlines how the firm manages its portfolio and its day-to-day work.
Principal-engineer work at Basis Technology — the earlier incarnation of today’s BasisTech, and a client since 1992. Rosette text-analytics demos, then the Adaptation Studio and Identity Studio NLP front ends, then early ChatGPT and LLM work. When Babel Street acquired Rosette, I steered the NLP and Cyber work through the handover.
Climate, air-quality, and device control for a 13,000-square-foot incubator space — live dashboards and alerting integrated with the building’s HVAC and smart-device systems — plus a Gmail-integrated CRM that keeps their contact pipeline in one place.
Working prototype for an early-stage parenting startup: an LLM-driven core that turns family-health questions into safe, practical guidance for parents.
Senior technical guidance for a social-media-analytics startup: I steered the architecture toward LLMs and proved it with fast prototypes, turning a research ML pipeline into something they could demo. I also reviewed the codebase and set up the practices to keep it shipping.
In their words
Some of these date back to the Symbian era — part of the same track record.
“When they made it run nearly twice as fast, we were really impressed! … These guys are true professionals, and they’re a pleasure to work with.”
“…great ability to develop reliable, complex software…”
“…one of the most featured and usable Talk Now clients we have, and this was no mean feat.”
“They have a good (and rare) feeling for what makes a good application. … All the little choices they made … were always perfect.”
“…a smart, customizable web interface that enabled us to produce a compelling demo and secure a critical round of financing.”
“…highly creative in his thinking, methodical and thorough, never fearing to explore new areas and tackling complicated challenges. On top of it all, he was a great human being.”
Field notes
Writing from inside the AI wave
I write about working with AI agents as they actually behave, not as advertised.
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Scheme in a Weekend, or, LLM: The Ultimate Intern
One weekend, 13,000 lines of Rust, all 1,225 conformance tests passing — and what it taught me about managing an AI that keeps declaring “done”.
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The Persistence of Memory
Agent memory files are configuration, not notes — and for the first time, the configuration writes itself.
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The Slash Command That Knew Too Much
My development workflows are now programs written in English, run by an LLM.
About
David Goldfarb
Degel Software is me — an independent software consultant in Beit Shemesh, Israel — and, when a project needs it, the like-minded senior developers I’ve worked with for years. I’ve kept the company deliberately small since 1988 so that everything it ships meets one quality standard: mine.
If you ask me to build something that seems wrong, I’ll tell you before I build it. You get a shared issue tracker you can read any time, schedules I don’t pad, and progress reports that tell you when something slipped. My goal is your project’s success, not billable hours.
I’ve been writing software since the late 1970s and I still like doing it — which is most of why the company never grew past the size where I could read every line. Clients across the decades have ranged from AOL, Sun, and Intel to Israel Aircraft Industries and the National University of Singapore.
- B.S. Computer Science, MIT, 1984
- Founded Degel Software Ltd., 1988
- Co-founded 2AM Inc., 1996
- Co-founded Vringo (CTO) — IPO’d as NYSE:VRNG, 2010
- Named inventor on four US patents (1999–2014)
- ACM member since 1982 · IEEE member since 1988
- ACM Computing Reviews featured reviewer
- Beit Shemesh, Israel · clients worldwide