Taking the Leap

I spent twenty years in the Navy. After that, a year in agricultural irrigation automation, then five years in defense contracting. That's a long career built around service, and I'm proud of the work I did and the people I got to do it with.

But somewhere along the way, I started asking myself a harder question: who is this actually for? I've seen a lot of good people doing good work inside systems that aren't always set up to make the most of it. Resources going to the wrong places. Priorities driven by process instead of purpose. I'm not here to point fingers. That's just the honest reality of working inside large organizations for a long time.

I wanted to build something different. Something where the work goes directly toward solving real problems for real people, and where I can stand behind every decision we make. So I stepped away from full-time employment to go all in on Deveau Engineering Ventures LLC and our flagship product, PawPIMS, a veterinary practice management platform built from the ground up for the people who actually use it.

Why Now

PawPIMS has grown past the point where nights-and-weekends energy can keep up with the opportunity in front of it. Veterinary practices deserve software that was designed for them, not adapted from human healthcare systems or stitched together from a half-dozen disconnected tools. That's what we're building, and building it right takes dedicated focus.

Built With a Real Partner

This work didn't start in a vacuum. Our earliest design conversations happened alongside the team at Peaceful Pawprints, a veterinary practice that cares deeply about doing right by their patients and their clients. Their real-world insight has shaped PawPIMS from day one, from scheduling and consent workflows to how we handle sensitive client communications. When I say we're building software for veterinary professionals, I mean we're building it with them.

Integrity and Transparency

I've seen what happens when software companies treat transparency as a marketing bullet point instead of an engineering principle. Data gets siloed. Pricing gets opaque. Practices get locked in.

That's not how we operate. Integrity and transparency aren't just things I believe in. They're baked into how PawPIMS is built:

• Your data is yours. Full export, no lock-in, no hostage negotiations if you ever decide to leave.
• Honest pricing. No hidden fees, no bait-and-switch tiers, no "contact sales" black boxes.
• Open communication. When something breaks, we say so. When a feature isn't ready, we don't pretend it is.

These aren't aspirational goals for some future version of the company. They're the rules we operate by today.

What's Ahead

For PawPIMS, going full-time means I can focus on the things that actually matter to the practices using it: making the day-to-day easier, improving the experience for their clients, and building features based on what veterinary teams are actually asking for rather than what looks good on a roadmap.

For Deveau Engineering Ventures and Log Cabin Coding, it also means I have the bandwidth to take on engineering work for other businesses and organizations. If you have a hardware integration problem, a data pipeline that needs building, or a custom automation project that nobody else wants to touch, that's exactly the kind of work we love. We bring the same integrity and hands-on approach to client projects that we put into our own products.

If you're in the veterinary space and want practice management software built with care, I'd love to hear from you. If you have an engineering challenge and want a partner who will be straight with you, same thing. And if you're a fellow founder making this same leap, reach out. The water's fine.

Cecil Deveau, Founder, Deveau Engineering Ventures LLC