Blog

Notes on the same unglamorous problems the case studies cover — payments, entitlements, encrypted data, cloud infrastructure — written up as they come up, not on a schedule.

Two analogue pressure gauges on industrial valves in black and white, each needle resting at a different reading

10 Sept 2026

GPT-6 Astra vs the field: what $/token hides

Every comparison post opens with a price-per-million-tokens table. Having built one from the primary sources, I think it's the least useful number in the whole comparison — because the four big providers now bill in four genuinely different shapes, and the shape is what lands on your invoice.

AIEngineeringEstimation

A long aisle receding between two rows of tall metal equipment racks in a data centre, lit from a skylit ceiling

8 Sept 2026

GPT-6 Astra: what the release notes actually say

Everyone covered the benchmark chart on day one. Fewer people read the pricing table and the model card, which is where the decisions actually live — a surcharge past 272K tokens, a reasoning trace you can't inspect, and a capability classification that changed what you're allowed to ask for.

AIEngineeringOpinion

Close-up of a rack switch labelled Cloud Router Switch with blue patch cables looping into it

26 Aug 2026

Leaving the cloud is having a moment. Most teams shouldn't.

Every few months a company blogs about cutting its AWS bill by sixty per cent, and my inbox fills with clients asking whether they should do the same. Usually the answer is no. Here's how to tell which side of the line you're on.

OpinionCloudInfrastructure

Code editor showing the upsert-based fix to the entitlement resolver

10 Aug 2026

Diagnosing duplicate Apple IAP transactions in production

A duplicate-transaction bug that only showed up under bad connectivity, traced through Apple's server-to-server notifications and a token-refresh loop that assumed happier network conditions than reality provides.

PaymentsiOSEntitlements

A wireframe neural-network sculpture suspended above a metal base on a dark grid

4 Aug 2026

AI writes the code now. That was never the hard part.

A year ago clients asked whether I could build the thing. Now they show up with a version a model already built, and the ask is to make it not fall over in production. The cheap part of software got cheaper. The expensive part didn't move.

OpinionAICareers

Code editor showing an AWS KMS client configured for hybrid post-quantum TLS

15 Jul 2026

Starting the post-quantum migration before we had to

A customer security questionnaire had one line we couldn't tick: the post-quantum cryptography roadmap. Protect-A-Plate stores identity-linked data that has to stay secret for a decade, which is exactly what harvest-now-decrypt-later targets. Here's the first, cheap step and the one incident it caused.

CryptographySecurityTLS

A stepped area chart rising from a point marked 'ship' and continuing upward across time

14 Apr 2026

The cheapest feature is the one you delete

Shipping a feature is the moment its cost starts, not the moment it ends. Every one you keep is a standing charge — in dependencies, security surface, test time, and the attention of whoever has to hold the whole thing in their head.

OpinionEngineeringMaintenance

A dashed line labelled 'the quote' with a small gold block of happy-path work above it and a large block of hidden work below

27 Jan 2026

You can't quote what you haven't found yet

Clients ask for a fixed price because it moves the risk onto me. For a well-bounded build that's a fair trade. For an integration, where the hard eighty per cent is invisible until you're in it, someone always loses the bet — usually both of us.

OpinionConsultingEstimation

Bar chart of eight short equal bars and one tall gold bar, labelled breadth and depth

8 Dec 2025

Full-stack is the floor now, not the ceiling

Ten years ago, being able to build the whole thing — schema, API, frontend, deploy — was the pitch. Now it's the baseline everyone claims and most people can back up. The premium moved to being unmistakably deep in one place.

OpinionCareersConsulting