Insights
Notes from the work
Engineering writing about problems we have actually had to solve.
· 9 min read
What a technical due diligence report should tell you
Most diligence reports grade the code. The useful ones price the risk, separate what blocks the deal from what you live with, and are explicit about what was not examined.
Read· 10 min read
Rosters are a constraint problem, not a calendar
Why filling shifts in order strands the ones only a few people can cover, and what changes when allocation treats the whole period as one problem.
Read· 9 min read
Model the state machine, not the screens
Most workflow software fails because it digitises the spreadsheet it replaced. The fix is to model the lifecycle first and let the interface follow from it.
Read· 9 min read
Replatforming without the rewrite that kills you
Big-bang rewrites fail for structural reasons, not because the team was weak. How to modernise a system incrementally, and the narrow cases where a rewrite is genuinely the right call.
Read· 10 min read
Settling bets exactly once when the feed lies
Result feeds send duplicates, corrections and out-of-order messages. Settlement has to pay out exactly once anyway. How to design a settlement engine that survives its inputs.
Read· 9 min read
Idempotency keys are not optional
Payment endpoints get called twice more often than anyone expects. Here is how to design idempotency properly, including the in-flight duplicate case most implementations get wrong.
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