Field notes & essays
In-depth, honest articles on custom software, CRM automation, HubSpot, integrations, and the judgement calls in between — written from real work, not summaries.
Everyone can wire an LLM to a vector database in an afternoon. The gap between that demo and a system people trust is almost entirely in retrieval — and retrieval is where most RAG projects quietly fail.
Taking over software you didn't write is disorienting and easy to do badly. Field notes on understanding a system before you touch it — and on resisting the rewrite that feels so obviously right and so often isn't.
Two systems need to stay in sync — do you push events or pull for changes? A practical guide to the trade-offs, and why the honest answer is often a bit of both.
Wiring two systems together for a demo takes an afternoon. Building an integration that survives production is a different discipline — and almost all of it lives in the failure paths nobody demos.
Internal tools have a quiet failure rate: they get built, launched, and then quietly abandoned for a spreadsheet. Here's what separates the ones people adopt from the ones they route around.
Most HubSpot workflows either do too little to matter or too much to trust. Here are the workflow patterns we build again and again because they reliably earn their keep.
Plenty of teams own HubSpot but quietly run their real work from spreadsheets on the side. The reasons are almost never technical — and neither, in the end, is the fix.
Manual data entry rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it goes unchallenged. A practical look at what it really costs — and how to reclaim it without a big rebuild.
Automation is easy to oversell. A practical framework for deciding which parts of your CRM and sales process to automate first — and which to leave alone.
18 articles