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One image, two states — cursor near, the plates separate

A compass pointing at a north that isn't there.

Dead North is the studio practice of Dane Petersen — web platforms, commerce systems, and the unglamorous infrastructure underneath them.

Fifteen years of Drupal, most of it on the parts nobody demos: the migration that has to not lose data, the checkout that has to not drop orders, the cache layer that decides whether any of it feels fast.

CH 01Selected workthree of them, chosen

Things that had to work

A short list on purpose. Three projects you can actually talk about beats twelve you cannot.

  1. CH 012026

    V.I.N.CENT

    Design + build

    Fleet operations for a portfolio of hosted sites — one screen for what is broken, what is stale, and what is about to cost someone money.

    • Drupal
    • Pantheon API
    • React
  2. CH 022025–

    Enhanced Taxonomy Manager

    Open source — creator & maintainer

    A replacement for Drupal core’s taxonomy UI, built for vocabularies from a dozen terms to 100,000 — drag-and-drop, undo history, bulk merge and clone. Running on 90+ production sites by drupal.org’s own count.

    • Drupal 10/11
    • Vanilla JS
    • SortableJS
  3. CH 032025

    Placeholder — platform migration

    Architecture

    Structure only. Same rule — lead with the problem, not the tech. The stack list underneath is where the tools go.

    • Drupal 11
    • Cloudflare
CH 02Practicehow the work runs
DEAD NORTHA TWIN CITIES TRANSMISSION · CH 00 · IN NOIR-O-VISION

The Twin Cities, in noir-o-vision — hover to lock the signal

Color is an event, not a default.

Her dress is the only color in the frame, and that is a design rule with a working life: spend attention in exactly one place and keep everything around it quiet.

Available for platform work, commerce builds, migrations, and the diagnostic engagements where somebody needs to find out why a site got slow. Small enough to answer the phone, old enough to have already made the mistake.

CH 03Signalstart here

Start the next thing

A build, a rebuild, a program, extra hands — describe it roughly, and rough is enough to get a real answer rather than a discovery call. Or skip the form:hello@deadnorth.io