Replacing a jQuery front end one screen at a time
The interface looks like 2012 and every change takes a week. Why a front-end rewrite is rarely the answer, and how to bring in React one screen at a time.
Notes from inside real business systems
What we learn taking ownership of established applications — written for the people who have to maintain the thing afterwards.
Running a private LLM on your own data: what it actually takes
A private LLM keeps your data on your own servers. What that involves in practice: hardware, model choice, retrieval, permissions, and the running costs.
Moving from .NET Framework 4.8 to modern .NET without stopping the business
.NET Framework 4.8 still runs, but it no longer moves. How to reach modern .NET one project at a time, what blocks the move, and what to leave alone.
The slow query is rarely the problem
Find the worst query, add an index, repeat. It never ends. What actually slows long-lived SQL Server systems, and the one session that finds most of it.
Taking over a half-finished project from another vendor
The previous vendor has gone and nobody knows how done the code really is. What the first month must establish, and why release one changes nothing.
Payment integrations — what breaks in production and why
Payment gateways are straightforward to integrate and difficult to operate. The problems appear months later, and almost none of them are in the happy path.
Where AI actually helps inside business software, and where it does not
The useful question is not where you can put AI. It is which parts of a job people are still doing by hand because the software cannot help them yet.
Extending a web platform to mobile without rebuilding the backend
Field staff want an app; the rebuild quote is frightening. You usually do not need one: your existing system already knows everything the app needs.
Adding a REST API to an application that was never designed for one
The API layer is the hinge of most modernization work, and where teams most often start in the wrong place: exposing the database instead of the business.
The business logic hiding in your stored procedures
In many long-lived business systems the rules that matter most are not in the C# but in T-SQL nobody will touch. How we map them without breaking anything.
What we look for in the first two weeks on a legacy .NET codebase
Before changing anything in an application we did not write, we spend two weeks reading it. What we are actually looking for, and why the order matters.
Let's work together
Recognise any of this in your own system?
Most of what we write about started as somebody's difficult Monday morning. If one of these sounds familiar, tell us about it.