Insights

The questions that keep coming up

Writing about software decisions: what to buy, what to build, and where AI actually earns its place.

Featured

41 Things Your Business Needs to Do

The map we work through to learn a business properly: forty-one areas of activity, broken down into the individual things a company can be good or bad at. Most of them never come up unprompted.

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"Ask a business what it is best at and it will tell you straight away. Ask which system that lives in, and it goes quiet."

Wilfred Greyling

Systems & Infrastructure

A series in eight chapters

The Long Answer

The long version, in the order the work actually happens. It starts somewhere much smaller than people expect and ends with a business's own customers noticing something they cannot quite name.

8 chapters | Start at chapter one

Read these first

For your business

Straight answers about software decisions, and the work that proves them.

Buying and Building | 8 min read

Connected, Not Cobbled

Buying everything leaves you renting your own operation. Building everything is worse. The question is which third of it is actually yours.

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Buying and Building | 6 min read

Every Setting Is a Promise

Software sold as fully configurable is making you a promise it has to keep for every combination of settings you never use. Sometimes the honest answer is a line of code nobody can change.

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AI & Automation | 5 min read

The long way round

From the workshop

The people who build and run it, thinking out loud about the trade. Nothing to sign up for.

Engineering Philosophy | 6 min read

The Tickbox and the Roadmap

A clause-by-clause reading of ISO 13485 against the software we build and run for Medeq, where nothing earned the top rating on purpose. What a tool can honestly claim in a regulated market, and what a ranked gap list buys that a badge cannot.

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Engineering Philosophy | 6 min read

The Sheet You Approve Once

A build with no natural ceiling became something we could put a price on, and the thing that changed was not the generating. It was agreeing what the answer looks like before any of it runs.

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