dbt 1.11 reaches end of life on 2026-12-19. Name one upgrade owner, check what runs, and plan from there.
Read the post: What is dbt, and who owns its upgrades before end of life?Engineering notes from real projects
Notes on rates, platform, DevOps, SRE, QA and AI work, with figures from our own projects.
Postmortem action items: why they never get done
Why postmortem fixes lose to feature work, and how to write, own and rank action items so incidents stop repeating.
Software architecture: when a monolith beats microservices
Default to a modular monolith. Split into services when independent team releases outweigh the cost of running the platform.
How to hire an AI consultant without buying a deck
Ask for a system that ran, its numbers and one failure. Then test the consultant on a small fixed scope.
How much does custom software cost?
Custom software costs rate times hours plus leadership. Ranges by how you buy, and how to estimate.
Cutting a cloud bill: what we check first
Where we look first on a cloud bill: who owns each line, requests against historical peaks, and what consolidation costs.
OpenTofu vs Terraform after the license change
Both tools run your own infrastructure fine, and the license starts to matter once you sell something built on top.
SOC 2 for the engineering team: the controls
The engineering controls a SOC 2 audit samples, and who does what. We build controls and never audit.
Technical cofounder, fractional CTO or agency?
Four ways to get a product built without a technical background, with what each costs and who steers.
AI agent examples: what ran in production and what didn't
A good AI agent example repeats a task, has checkable output and keeps a person at the irreversible step.
Backstage implementation cost: build, maintain and host
A Backstage implementation costs three things: the first version, the engineer who owns it, and the hosting.
In-house vs outsourced engineers: the real cost
An in-house engineer costs wages, benefits and hiring time. An outsourced one costs a rate. The arithmetic, with sources.
Staff augmentation vs managed services
Staff augmentation adds engineers you direct, managed services hand off a function, a fixed-scope project buys one result.
Backstage vs Port: how to choose a developer portal
Both Backstage and Port work, and what decides between them is who maintains the portal after launch.
Nearshore vs offshore for engineering teams
Engineers in LATAM share six to eight working hours with New York, and that overlap matters more than the rate.
QA outsourcing and Playwright automation
Automate the checks a script repeats the same way every time, and keep exploratory testing and judgment manual.
Toptal and BairesDev alternatives for a nearshore team
Tecla, CloudDevs and Arc print hourly figures. So do we, and our real weak spot is the 6-month minimum.
Argo CD and Kargo: promoting releases safely
Argo CD keeps environments matching Git, and Kargo promotes a release stage by stage only after checks pass.
Build or buy an internal developer platform?
You rarely build an internal developer platform from scratch or buy one whole, so decide which layers you own.
DORA metrics: how to measure and improve them
DORA has five metrics: two come from your deploy records and three need an incident record.
Forward deployed engineer vs a consultancy: which to hire
Hire a forward deployed engineer to fix things inside your systems, a consultancy for an outside view.
Grafana vs Datadog: cost, lock-in and OpenTelemetry
Datadog bills per host and event, Grafana per unit of data, and OpenTelemetry should come first with either.
Platform engineering vs DevOps vs SRE: who does what
DevOps is the practice, SRE is one way to run operations, and platform engineering builds the internal product.
How much does an AI agent cost?
An AI agent costs a one-time build and a per-task run, and the run cost decides if it survives.
Nearshore developer rates in 2026, explained
Our nearshore LATAM engineers cost USD 30 to 60 an hour, from junior to lead or architect.
What a 2-week CI/CD and IaC rebuild delivers
A two-week CI/CD and IaC rebuild should leave a push gate, encrypted state, plan brakes and deploys by digest.
What we write about
Each post answers one question and links to the page where the work is sold.
- Nearshore rates and how our prices are built
- Staff augmentation, managed services and fixed-scope projects
- Platform engineering and internal developer platforms
- CI/CD, infrastructure as code and safe releases
- SRE, observability and QA automation
- AI agents and forward deployed engineering
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