Software maintenance cost is the number that turns a successful project into a difficult conversation eighteen months later. The build was budgeted, approved and delivered. What happens after it goes live was described as “support” and given a figure somebody guessed at, and that figure was almost always too small. The...
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Technical due diligence is not a code quality competition, and teams preparing for one usually spend their time on the wrong thing. Nobody buying a company is grading your abstractions. They are trying to work out what it will cost to own this system, and how badly it can go wrong after the money changes hands. That...
Database performance work usually begins with someone proposing a bigger instance, and it usually ends with the discovery that one query was doing a sequential scan over four million rows on every page load. The hardware was never the constraint. The plan was. That pattern is consistent enough to be worth stating as a...
Entity SEO starts from a fact that most optimisation advice still ignores: search engines stopped matching strings a long time ago. They match things. A page is not scored on whether it contains a phrase, it is scored on whether the system believes the page is about the concept behind the phrase, and on how confident...
Software testing strategies are usually described in terms of coverage, and coverage is the least informative number in the whole discipline. A codebase at ninety per cent can ship a bug on its most-used path, because coverage measures which lines executed during a test run, not whether anything meaningful was asserted...
Fintech software development is priced and scheduled like ordinary software development right up until somebody asks who is authorised to hold the money. At that point the project stops being an engineering exercise and becomes a regulatory one with an engineering component, and the timeline you had in mind stops being...
MVP software development goes wrong at the scoping meeting, not during the build. Somebody says “minimum viable product”, everybody nods, and then the feature list arrives containing user accounts, an admin panel, billing, notifications, a dashboard and a mobile app. That is not a minimum viable product. That is a...
Ranked but not cited is the specific frustration of doing search engine optimisation correctly and watching it produce nothing. The rankings arrive. The impressions climb. The clicks do not follow, and no amount of rewriting the title tag changes it. That is not a failure of your optimisation. It is what happens when...
The honest answer to whether llms.txt does anything yet is: almost nothing, measurably, and the people telling you it is essential for AI visibility are selling something. That is an uncomfortable position to hold while also recommending you publish one, so this post shows the numbers and then explains the...
Whether to block AI crawlers is presented as a technical question and it is not one. Blocking them is a few lines of configuration that takes ten minutes. The hard part is deciding whether you want to, and that decision is commercial: you are choosing between protecting content from being trained on and being present...