Field notes & essays

Engineering writing worth your time

In-depth, honest articles on custom software, CRM automation, HubSpot, integrations, and the judgement calls in between — written from real work, not summaries.

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LatestAI Engineering

AI Agents, Minus the Hype — What They're Actually Good For

A practical, sceptical guide to AI agents for real businesses — what changes when a model can act rather than just answer, and how to give it autonomy without giving it the keys.

16 October 2026 10 min read

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Digital Transformation

When to Modernise a Legacy System (and When to Leave It Alone)

A working system nobody enjoys is not automatically a system worth rebuilding. Here's how to decide honestly whether legacy software is a real liability or just unfashionable — and the safer middle paths nobody reaches for first.

14 Oct 2026 11 min read

Next.js

Server Components, Explained for Business Owners

You keep hearing that your website should use server components. Here's what that actually means for your speed, your costs, and your search ranking — translated out of jargon and into the numbers you care about.

30 Sept 2026 10 min read

AI Engineering

The Demo Was Free — Engineering LLM Features for Cost and Latency

An LLM feature that delights ten test users can quietly become slow and ruinously expensive at ten thousand. The economics of AI in production are an engineering problem, and mostly a solved one — if you design for them.

18 Sept 2026 11 min read

CRM Automation

Lead Routing That Doesn't Drop the Ball

Most lost leads aren't lost to competitors — they're lost to a routing system that quietly dropped them. Here's how to build one that doesn't.

9 Sept 2026 10 min read

API Integrations

Rate Limits, Retries, and Backoff: Integrating With APIs You Don't Control

When you depend on someone else's API, you inherit their limits, outages, and moods. Here's how to build integrations that stay calm and correct when the other side doesn't cooperate.

26 Aug 2026 12 min read

AI Engineering

Where AI Automation Actually Pays Off (and Where It's Theatre)

There's enormous pressure to 'add AI' to everything right now. Some of it is genuinely transformative. A lot of it is an expensive way to do worse what a simple rule already did well. Here's how to tell them apart.

14 Aug 2026 9 min read

Performance

Making a Marketing Site Genuinely Fast (Not Just Fast on Paper)

A high Lighthouse score is easy to game and easy to lose. Here's how we build marketing sites that are fast for real users, and stay fast as they grow.

5 Aug 2026 12 min read

Custom Software

The MVP Trap: Building Just Enough Without Building Regret

"Minimum viable product" is good advice that's easy to misread in both directions. Here's how to build the smallest useful thing without building something you'll have to throw away.

29 Jul 2026 10 min read

24 articles