Notes from the workshop

What we learned building things, written up while it was still fresh. No thought leadership, no listicles.

The engineering log we keep that nobody is required to read

A running, informal record of decisions and dead ends, kept without a template or a mandate, has quietly become one of the most useful documents on every project.

EngineeringProcessQuality

Engineering · 5 min

30 Jul 2026

What we do differently for a fixed-price project now

Fixed-price work always required tight scoping. Faster, more variable implementation speed changed which parts of that discipline matter most.

ProcessDeliveryClients

Process · 6 min

29 Jul 2026

The difference between fast feedback and early feedback

Coding agents shortened the time between writing code and getting a result. That is not the same thing as shortening the time between a bad idea and someone noticing.

EngineeringProcessAI

Engineering · 6 min

28 Jul 2026

Build note: a permissions audit trail a regulator actually accepted

A financial services client needed an audit trail that would satisfy an external reviewer, not just a table of who-did-what. The distinction changed the design.

Case studyEngineeringData

Case notes · 7 min

27 Jul 2026

A postmortem for a launch that actually went fine

We started writing a short retrospective after successful launches, not just failed ones, on the theory that luck and process look identical from the outside.

ProcessDeliveryQuality

Process · 5 min

24 Jul 2026

The load test that only mattered because of one integration

Our own application handled the traffic without difficulty. A third-party service two calls downstream did not, and that was the whole story.

TestingQualityEngineering

Quality · 6 min