Engineering & growth notes.

Most automation that saves a business time has no AI in it. How we choose between plain rules and AI, using five of our own projects as examples.

Xamarin apps can no longer ship store updates. How we move a Xamarin.Forms app to .NET MAUI, and what changes beyond renaming the namespaces.

Most software projects we build take three to six months. Durations, team sizes and hours from 28 real projects, and what made each one short or long.

A checklist for vetting a remote developer before they start, and the four checks every engineer passes before they reach a client’s shortlist with us.

How we pick React Native, Flutter or native code for a client app, with the reasons behind Nextflag, Trusted Tastes, StoreBevy and Slumber & Sprout.

How we moved AutoBuffy, a US auto parts store, from Angular 8 to 13 in 20 days, one version at a time, and added server-side rendering for search.

How we moved Coach Catalyst, a live coaching platform, from Vue 2 to Vue 3, rebuilt its CoffeeScript chat in Vue and added Stripe Connect payouts.

Why chatbots invent facts, and how retrieval-augmented generation fixed it on Money Ball, our NFL stats chatbot that checks live data before it answers.

Security deposits, payouts to sellers, store credit for refunds and subscriptions: how we built marketplace payments with Stripe on six real platforms.

What a software discovery call with us covers, what to have ready, and what you get afterwards: a team recommendation, a timeline and a plan with milestones.

Why a slow React app is usually slow behind the front end, how we sped up Cercle’s pages without rewriting components, and what to check first.

When to configure GoHighLevel and when to build a custom CRM, from the sales automation we set up for a US bookkeeping firm.

How we stopped a Tenerife tour company’s booking planner refusing 75% of trips, then automated its sale alerts, review requests and Google setup.

Staff augmentation adds engineers to your team; outsourcing hands a partner the outcome. How to choose, and how each works when you work with us.

Ten questions to ask a software development partner before you sign, what a good answer sounds like, and how we answer each one ourselves.

How to scope and launch an MVP, with what we learned from Cinekit’s one-month build and from measuring real users after launch.

The Python and Django features behind our production work, from Celery workers to retrieval pipelines, with examples from Money Ball, Natif.ai and Mi Taller.

Which architecture choices absorb growth and which force a rewrite, with examples from AutoBuffy, Truck-4, BuffyHub, ATC and Cad Cam Masters.

Why testing at the end of a project always loses, and how we gate releases instead, with examples from BuffyHub, Truck-4, ATC and Luxe Excursions.