About Madrasco

Madrasco is a software studio in Australia. We build tools for jobs that should be simple but aren't: a file rejected for reasons nobody explains, a check that has to be done by hand every time, a task that looks easy until you try to do it right. So far that has mostly meant checking and fixing files; the next problem may be something else entirely.

Much of the work is understanding the problem: what exactly goes wrong, for whom, and what "fixed" should mean. When that's clear, the solution can usually be simple. We'd rather a tool do one job correctly than many jobs roughly.

How we work

We test each tool on real-world files, not just examples we made ourselves, before we say it works. Each tool's page says what it's for, what it isn't for, and how we tested it.

The studio is run by one person, who decides what gets built and answers support email. We use AI coding tools in building and testing.

The name

The Torrente Madrasco is a mountain stream in Val Madre, a side valley of the Valtellina in northern Italy. It runs down to the river Adda at Fusine, a village named after the forges that worked iron from the valley's mines. Say it mad-RASS-co.

The map on the home page shows Val Madre in 100-metre contours, traced from the Copernicus 30-metre elevation model, with the stream and the Adda from OpenStreetMap. North is to the right, so the Madrasco flows left to right, down to Fusine.

This website

Plain static pages. Links start loading when you hover over them, so pages open straight away.

Headings are set in Schibsted Grotesk, body text in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next (designed by the Braille Institute for readers with low vision) and data in JetBrains Mono. All three are open-source and served from this site.

Map data: produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. Stream and river data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.

Contact

[email protected] for questions, bug reports and refunds. See Support.