Consulting practice & product studio
Chicago area · remote-first
Aging .NET estate?
There's a playbook.
Little Fort Software turns legacy .NET systems into modern, cloud-native Azure platforms, then wires in AI that earns its keep. Led by Rico Turman: fifteen years of architecture, one specialty.
Free, no pitch. Worst case, you leave with a clearer picture. Replies within 24 hours.
The playbook
Four plays. Every engagement starts the same way: naming which one you're running.
PLAY 01the flagship
The Modernization
Run it when
- Your product still ships on Web Forms or .NET Framework
- Every new feature costs more than the last one did
- The people who understand the monolith keep leaving
The work
A current-state assessment, a target architecture your team actually believes in, and a migration sequenced so the business never stops shipping. Monolith to services, Web Forms to modern .NET and React, on-prem to Azure.
PLAY 02
The Azure Foundation
Run it when
- You're on Azure, but nobody would call it architected
- Deploys are scary, manual, or measured in hours
- The monthly bill keeps growing and nobody knows why
The work
Architecture design and review across App Services, AKS, Functions, API Management, Key Vault, and Azure SQL. CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code with Azure DevOps, Terraform, and PowerShell. Cost surgery included.
PLAY 03
The AI Integration
Run it when
- Leadership wants AI in the product; engineering wants it to actually work
- Code review is your bottleneck
- You'd rather skip the hype cycle entirely
The work
AI code review and agentic tooling wired into real engineering workflows. LLM features in .NET products, cloud-hosted or on-device. Built by someone who ships this, not someone who merely talks about it.
PLAY 04
The Fractional Architect
Run it when
- You need judgment for plays 01–03 on tap, without paying a full-time architect's salary
- The big decisions land quarterly, not daily
The work
Recurring monthly hours: architecture decisions, design reviews, technical coaching, roadmap sanity checks. Async-first, with scheduled availability windows your team can count on.
Game film
Real numbers from systems where Rico was the architect of record.
2.2B
records, reporting interactively
Multi-year, fine-grain queries brought from minutes to seconds with columnstore fact tables, designed around a zero-downtime rollout.
B2B analytics platform
<20 min
deploys, down from hours
Release engineering rebuilt end to end: modern CI/CD pipelines across 20+ servers with different packaging requirements.
DevOps transformation
600K → 30M
records in a national registry
A clinical outcomes registry that grew 50× on architecture he helped build, maintain, and evolve over five years.
Healthcare data systems
We run our own drills
The fastest way to vet a consultant: look at what they ship when nobody's paying them to.
Open source · Azure DevOps extension
Copilot Code Review
AI code reviews on your pull requests, using the GitHub Copilot or Claude Code subscriptions your team already has. Faster, more consistent feedback on the obvious issues, while humans control the final approval.
Cross-platform app
Engram
An AI notebook built on a simple thesis: modern open models make cloud inference unnecessary for personal notes. Speech to structured notes, fully on-device, with optional zero-knowledge encrypted sync.
The author
Rico Turman
- 2011National medical registries: helped a clinical outcomes registry grow from 600K records to 30 million; lead developer on a nationwide incident-reporting system.
- 2015SaaS control panels: rebuilt a Web Forms hosting portal as a fully modern MVC product, on a fully remote team.
- 2020B2B analytics: architect for a cloud-native Azure platform; rebuilt the client experience, the pipelines, and eventually the reporting engine.
Every chapter, the same play: take the legacy thing, make it modern, and leave the team faster than you found it.
Call the play
Tell me what's creaking.
You'll get a straight read on whether there's a play for it, and which one. If the honest answer is that you don't need a consultant, that's the answer you'll get.
- Free 30-minute discovery call: no pitch, no obligation
- Replies within 24 hours, usually faster
- Remote-first · core collaboration hours 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM CST
- Simple terms: MSA + SOW per engagement