Things worth writing down
Notes from building software for real businesses — the decisions that turned out to matter and the ones that did not. We publish when we have something specific to say.
Build it offline first, or don't build it for phones
Connectivity is not a rare failure — it is a normal condition. What changes when you design a mobile app for the network being gone, and why retrofitting it is so expensive.
What a discovery call should cover before anyone quotes
Most software quotes are wrong because the conversation before them was too short. The questions worth asking, and the ones that predict whether a project goes badly.
We shipped an AI voice assistant inside a school app
What it takes to put a voice assistant into an app real parents use — the parts that are easy, the parts that are not, and the decisions that keep it from saying something wrong.
What HIPAA-grade hosting actually costs
A realistic breakdown of the infrastructure bill for a small healthcare application — what is genuinely required, what vendors upsell, and where the recurring cost really sits.
Reading a codebase you didn't write
Inheriting software is normal — a developer left, an agency finished, you acquired something. A method for getting oriented in days rather than months, and the three things to check before promising anything.
What a broken deploy actually costs
A file-by-file deploy left a client site live but unstyled for part of an afternoon. The fix took minutes. The lesson was about what 'deployed' means when a transfer can stop halfway.
Flutter or native: how to actually decide
The question is not which is better. It is which constraints your app actually has — and four of them decide the answer before preference gets involved.
What HIPAA requires from case management software
What decides whether software can hold protected health information: hosting, access control, audit logging, and the choices that are expensive to reverse later.