Written by the people doing the work.
No thought leadership, no predictions for next year, no posts about what a technology "means for enterprises." Just what we learned on a project recently, including the parts that were embarrassing. Every post is signed by whoever did the work.
We dual-ran two ledgers for eleven weeks. Here's the bill.
Running a new settlement system alongside a twenty-year-old mainframe costs roughly double the infrastructure and two engineers watching a reconciliation dashboard. We were pushed to cut it to four weeks at the halfway point. Three of the nineteen discrepancies we found surfaced after week eight, in month-end processing — which, by definition, only happens monthly. This is the arithmetic we'd show anyone facing the same argument.
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Your RAG system is fine. Your evaluation set is the problem.
How we build golden datasets that catch regressions before customers do, why 200 hand-labelled examples beat 20,000 synthetic ones, and the retrieval failure that only appeared when we sorted by document age.
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We stopped asking algorithm puzzles. Retention went up.
Three years of data from replacing whiteboard rounds with paid work samples — acceptance rates, first-year attrition, and the demographic shift we didn't set out to cause but are glad about.
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The nurse who reordered our entire roadmap
We had a sensible technical sequence that would have shown clinicians nothing usable for five months. One conversation in week three changed the plan, and the project succeeded because of it.
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Half your cloud bill is untagged, and that's the whole problem
A FinOps write-up from three migrations. The savings almost never come from rightsizing instances — they come from finding the four workloads nobody could name an owner for.
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The optimal route nobody would drive
A model that was 6% better on paper and ignored in practice. What a week of ride-alongs found that two years of telemetry hadn't, and why we now budget for fieldwork.
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In defence of not rewriting it
We've talked four clients out of rewrites in the last two years. Three were right to stay put. Here's the framework we use, and the one case where rewriting genuinely was correct.
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Our accessibility audit passed. The users still couldn't use it.
Automated checks caught 31 issues. A two-hour session with four screen-reader users caught eleven more, and every one of them was the kind that makes a product unusable rather than merely annoying.
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We budgeted two weeks for handover and needed five
An operations team had twenty years of intuition about a batch system that simply didn't transfer to an event-sourced one. What we got wrong, and how we estimate handover now.
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Architecture decisions we got right, and the ones we had to undo. No product announcements, no webinar invitations. Unsubscribe in one click.