Category
15 articles
Somewhere in Britain, a booking system serving thousands of customers a month is running on a VPS that costs less than a meal deal and a coffee. We look at how these tiny setups survive, why they fall over, and when upgrading is actually worth the money.
Standups, refinements, retros and async check-ins have quietly become the most expensive line item on a UK dev team's books. Here's how to work out what your calendar actually costs — in hours and in pounds — and a blunt playbook for cutting it back.
Plenty of British small firms run their entire payment stack on one contractor's memory — and everything's fine until the Thursday he doesn't turn up. We spoke to teams who lived through a resignation and came back with a playbook for getting that knowledge out of one head and into the repo.
You've inherited a legacy system with no docs, a vanished original author, and a client who refers to it only as 'the system'. Before you suggest anything drastic, here's how to spend your first month mapping the terrain, building a safety net, and keeping the rewrite conversation firmly off the table.
UK transport systems fail in public every single day, yet somehow the country keeps moving. We dig into the patterns behind TfL's open data and National Rail's delay feeds to find out what developers can steal for their own error handling.
Two developers, one on-prem shop and a self-imposed deadline of 5pm on a Friday. We reconstruct the migration hour by hour — the decisions, the rollbacks and the untested backup restore that nearly made it all irrelevant.
Developers love to sneer at spreadsheets, but most of the UK's small businesses would collapse overnight without them. Before you pitch the rebuild, here's how to tell the harmless Excel habit from the genuinely dangerous one — and when code actually earns its keep.
One hardcoded cloud key, one public repo, and a £4,000 bill racked up over a long weekend. We reconstruct the incident step by step — and give you the checklist that would have stopped it before lunch.
The Friday deploy ban is fading, but what's replaced it says a lot about team size, not fashion. We look at how UK teams of different shapes actually release software, and offer a no-nonsense framework for picking a cadence that suits you.
Every dev team runs on a shadow constitution: don't deploy Fridays, don't touch the billing module before a standup, and whatever you do, ask Dave about the spreadsheet. These unwritten rules aren't superstition — they're documentation nobody wrote down. Here's how to capture them before Dave takes them to Manchester.
We spoke to IT managers and developers at UK SMEs to put actual pound signs on failed deployments — lost revenue, breached SLAs, and the Tuesday afternoon your whole team spent firefighting. Use our back-of-napkin calculator to make the case for proper CI/CD to your boss.
Most UK SMEs don't have a data protection problem — they have a data archaeology problem. Here's how to dig through ageing codebases for personal data landmines without stalling the product roadmap.
Your API passes every test in Postman, then falls over the moment a real user on a Northern line train with two bars of 4G tries to check out. Here's how to build a local environment that actually resembles production — contract tests, traffic replay and all.
Most UK SMEs don't have a security team — they have a CTO who also does the hiring. Here's a practical, no-fluff approach to dependency hygiene that fits into a Friday afternoon, drawing on the npm and PyPI incidents that should have taught us all a lesson by now.
We spent twelve months combing through software projects from SMEs across Britain — from Manchester's .NET holdouts to Shoreditch's Node.js shops. The patterns we found say a lot about how the UK really builds software.