Field notes
What we’ve learned shipping things.
Practical writing from the people doing the work — engineering, commerce, mobile and the customer-experience floor. No thought-leadership, no SEO sludge.
Teams
Hire-to-own: designing our own way out
Half the people we place end up on the client's payroll. Here is why we wrote that into the contract instead of quietly defending against it.
6 min read
Teams
How we build a dedicated team in 21 days
The unglamorous mechanics behind a three-week ramp: a standing bench, one hiring bar, and an onboarding programme that is rehearsed rather than improvised.
6 min read
Industry
What a bad support floor costs, in numbers
Customer operations is treated as a cost line and behaves like a revenue line. Here is how we model the real figure, and what staffing to a forecast changes.
5 min read
AI
What we tell clients about the EU AI Act
Most AI features companies are shipping are not high-risk. The documentation burden still applies, and it is easier to produce while you build than afterwards.
6 min read
Engineering
Replatforming without losing a season
A headless migration is mostly a redirect problem, a data problem and a nerve problem. What we do in the six weeks before cutover.
6 min read
Commerce
Killing the nightly CSV export
Overselling during campaigns is almost never a warehouse problem. It is a sixteen-hour-old stock file, and replacing it is mostly about idempotency.
5 min read
Teams
Why we build from Den Haag and Prishtina
On the boring, durable advantage of two offices — one near the customer, one near the talent — and how we actually run it day to day.
5 min read
Industry
GDPR when your company is American
A US entity selling into Europe is still bound by the GDPR. What changes is the paperwork, the transfer basis and who your customers ask for.
5 min read
Engineering
Shipping to both stores with four people
Parity between iOS and Android is a staffing decision disguised as a technical one. How a small team ships to both without doubling.
5 min read
Teams
The delivery report nobody skips
A weekly written report sounds like overhead until you notice it is the only artefact that reliably catches a project drifting before the client does.
5 min read
Commerce
Checkout is a product, not a plugin
Most conversion work happens on product pages. Most conversion is lost after the customer has already decided to buy — in the last four screens.
5 min read
AI
Cutting AI cost with model routing
Most production AI traffic is easy. Sending all of it to your largest model is the most common and most expensive mistake we see.
5 min read
Teams
The bench is the product
Paying senior people to sit between engagements is the least efficient thing we do, and the reason a shortlist can exist in seventy-two hours.
5 min read
Design
What accessibility audits actually find
Contrast ratios are the easy part. The findings that take real work are keyboard traps, focus order and forms that only make sense visually.
5 min read
Engineering
Passkeys instead of seed phrases
The seed phrase is the single biggest reason ordinary people abandon crypto wallets. Account abstraction lets you delete it entirely.
5 min read
Product
Pricing fixed-scope work honestly
A fixed price is a bet on your own estimate. Here is how we shape one so the bet is fair to both sides rather than padded into safety.
5 min read
Teams
Opening a customer experience floor
An engineering company deciding to answer phones sounds like a distraction. It turned out to be the fastest way to find out what our software was doing wrong.
6 min read
Engineering
Offline-first is an architecture
Field apps do not need better error handling for lost connections. They need a data model where the network was never assumed in the first place.
6 min read
AI
Evaluations before demos
Anyone can build an impressive language model demo in an afternoon. The evaluation suite is what tells you whether it still works next month.
5 min read
Industry
Forecasting support volume with Erlang C
Support teams miss service levels because they are staffed to a monthly average. Contact volume is not an average, and the maths for this is a century old.
5 min read
Commerce
Headless commerce is a migration problem
The new storefront is the part everyone looks at. Whether the replatform succeeds is decided by redirects, catalogue data and the ERP integration.
5 min read
Engineering
The strangler pattern, in practice
Replacing a system that cannot stop running is mostly about routing and reconciliation. The rewrite is the easy half.
6 min read
Design
Design systems that survive handover
Most design systems decay the moment the designer leaves. The ones that survive share a single source of truth with the code, not a screenshot of one.
5 min read
Engineering
React Native or native: how we decide
The framework argument is usually the wrong argument. What matters is whether the product depends on platform depth, and who maintains it in a year.
5 min read
Teams
An office, not a contractor pool
Opening in Prishtina cost more and moved slower than hiring freelancers would have. It is the reason the team still exists four years later.
5 min read
Engineering
What technical due diligence finds
Two weeks reading someone else's codebase before quoting a rebuild. The findings are rarely about code quality and almost always about coupling.
5 min read
Teams
Hiring the first ten engineers
The first ten hires set a standard that the next fifty are measured against. What we got right, and the one thing we would do differently.
5 min read
Engineering
Invariants before contracts
Writing down what must always be true, before writing the code that must never break it, is the cheapest smart-contract security you can buy.
5 min read
Product
Scoping work you can actually price
Most project overruns are decided before the first commit, in a proposal that described an outcome nobody had defined precisely enough to build.
5 min read
Teams
Why we started Blocify
We had spent years watching agencies produce beautiful slides and brittle software. The fix turned out to be structural rather than technical.
5 min read