Grateful to Devin Becker and Naavik team for having me on the podcast.
Grateful to Devin Becker and Naavik team for having me on the podcast. If you work in mobile gaming, you already know this: Acquiring a new player has never been more expensive. UA costs are rising. Competition for attention is brutal. The algorithm keeps changing. And every new install costs more than the last one. […]
You can’t out-token bad modeling !
You can’t out-token bad modeling ! History keeps repeating itself in data. And nobody seems to notice. 1996. Ralph Kimball publishes The Data Warehouse Toolkit. Structured data. Star schemas. Dimensional modeling. Clean, disciplined, expensive to build, but when it worked, it worked. Early 2000s. NoSQL arrives. MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB. “Relational databases are too rigid. Structure […]
The less it costs to build, the more it costs to build the wrong thing.
The less it costs to build, the more it costs to build the wrong thing. Everyone is talking about AI replacing engineers. Some of that is true. Junior and mid-level execution work is getting squeezed. Fast. But there’s a layer nobody is talking about. Senior technical judgment is getting more valuable. Not less. Here’s why. […]
Last week we ran an AI training day for developers.
Last week we ran an AI training day for developers. 40 people. 3 hours. One topic: how to actually use AI to ship faster. Not ChatGPT for answering questions. Not copy-pasting code from a browser tab. Real AI-assisted development. Terminal-level. Codebase-aware. Production-ready. We showed two real products built with this approach: SaaS product A: data […]
AI-Era Problem, Pre-AI Solution
AI-Era Problem, Pre-AI Solution A CEO called me a few weeks ago. His SaaS platform was a mess. He needed help sorting it out and preparing for scale. Normal enough. Then I asked about the team. 50 people in R&D. That number alone told me most of what I needed to know. In 2026, a […]
Outsourcing and staffing as we knew them are dead.
Outsourcing and staffing as we knew them are dead. Over the last year I ran technology audits across several companies. When I got to the people layer, the numbers were hard to ignore: (downsizing/rightsizing) Company A: 20 engineers → 5 Company B: 17 engineers → 2 Company C: 17 engineers → 5 Same output. In […]
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln My friend does remodeling and construction work. I asked him once what the biggest lesson he’d learned in his line of work was. “90% of the job is using the right tool for […]
We cut AWS S3 costs by 40% overnight.
🔪We cut AWS S3 costs by 40% overnight. The storage wasn’t the problem. A lot of companies assume their AWS bill is driven by infrastructure size. In reality, it’s often driven by behavior. In this case: very small storage footprint no heavy traffic nothing “obviously expensive” Yet the bill kept growing. After digging in: ~85% […]
I audited a platform last week.
I audited a platform last week. Found a system built 25 years ago. Still running. Still processing real transactions. Real money. Nobody on the current team fully understands how it works. Nobody knows why it was built the way it was. And nobody has ever asked whether it still needs to exist. But it costs […]
I just got off a call where someone told me:
I just got off a call where someone told me: their clients don’t understand agile don’t know how to scale their code struggle to even debug properly A few years ago, this would sound absurd. Today, it’s becoming normal. We spent years worrying about technical debt. Now we’re entering a world of cognitive debt. AI […]