The Virtual Panda is an independent software studio launched in August 2025 by Brenton Unger. It exists for two reasons: to build and run its own products, and to give business owners straight answers about software before they commit money to it.
The products come first. Everything in the products section is software that shipped and is still maintained, not a portfolio of concepts. Running them is what keeps the advice honest, because the same tradeoffs that show up in client work show up here too, with nobody else to hand them to.
Eidos, and who owns what
Eidos is the biggest thing the studio has built. The
standard it implements, the EIDOS.md document that says what a
framework and a blueprint are, came out of
Buildable and is theirs,
published under Apache-2.0. That is the extent of the partnership. Everything at
eidosmd.com, the eidosmd CLI,
the local browser, the registry, and the documentation, is The Virtual Panda's own product,
built and owned here.
How the consulting works
Most software goes wrong before anyone writes code, and most process problems are visible long before anyone builds a tool to fix them. Both services are built around that: get the problem on paper, work out what it is really worth, and only then talk about building.
The deliverable is always yours. If a discovery engagement ends with you taking the spec to a different developer, or deciding the project is not worth doing, it did its job.
Who you are actually talking to
There is no account manager. You talk to the person doing the work, which is a deliberate constraint on how much work gets taken on at once.
About me
Hi, I'm Brenton. Texas, then Washington, then Oregon, where I studied software engineering at Oregon Tech and never really left. I have been at Buildable, a software engineering firm in Oregon, since 2021, starting as a junior engineer and now as a Software Engineering Manager. That job is where I learned most of what this studio sells: four years of client projects, web apps, mobile apps, and a lot of discoveries where the most valuable thing we did was talk someone out of building the wrong thing.
I'm a software engineer, not a "developer" or a "coder", and I'm picky about that. I started The Virtual Panda in August 2025 because I had products I wanted to exist and opinions about how software should be defined before it is built. Both are on this site now. I still work at Buildable during the day and I'm not planning to change that; the studio is what I do with the rest.
Off the clock it is soccer, rugby, tennis, jiujitsu, carpentry, rock climbing, snowboarding, and reading, if audiobooks count. The longer version, the resume, and the occasional post about all of it are on my own site.
