Estimating work without lying to yourself
Estimate in ranges, separate unknowns from known work, and review weekly. Precision theatre is how timelines die.
Client Guides
Engineering
Monitoring that actually catches problems
Logs, metrics, and alerts should point to action. If your alert doesn’t tell you what to do next, it’s noise.
Business
When to refactor vs when to rewrite
Refactor when the core value is sound and complexity is localised. Rewrite only when the architecture blocks you and the
Client Guides
A simple checklist before launching new features
Define success, confirm rollback plan, verify monitoring, and test the happy path plus the top failure modes. Launching should feel
Engineering
Reducing risk in legacy Rails codebases
Legacy Rails can be reliable if you treat it like infrastructure: small changes, tests where it matters, safe deploys, and
Client Guides
Integrations: how to avoid spaghetti systems
Keep integration points explicit. Use contracts (schemas), retries, idempotency, and monitoring. ‘It works on my machine’ is not an integration
Business
Choosing between retainer and project work
Retainers are for continuity and speed. Projects are for defined outcomes. Mixing them without clarity creates scope creep and resentment.
Engineering
Incident response basics for small teams
Define severity, assign an incident lead, communicate clearly, and write a short postmortem. The goal is learning, not blaming.
Business
When performance work is actually worth it
If users complain or costs climb, performance is revenue. Measure first, fix the bottleneck, then keep an eye on regressions.
Client Guides
How to brief an engineering partner
Give context, constraints, access, and success criteria. The best brief is a clear problem statement plus examples of what ‘good’