Notes from inside the sprints.
11 pieces, each written by the engineer or lead who did the work: what actually breaks in a Shopify Plus checkout at scale, how a release train reaches two app stores every week, how to read an unfamiliar codebase in 48 hours, when hiring engineers beats buying sprint capacity, and why our prices sit on the site while everyone else’s sit behind a form. No listicles, and nothing here we have not shipped.
What outsourced software development actually costs
What outsourced software development really costs: four ways to buy it, the costs no rate card shows, and how to compare a quote with a hire.
Read article ›
Shopify Plus cost: the licence, the fees and the build
What Shopify Plus costs in 2026: the licence, the fees on top of it, the apps and the build, with our sprint prices and two real engagements priced at them.
Read article ›
Running a release train for two app stores
Weekly releases to the App Store and Play: where to put the cut, why features ship dark, and how to treat a rejection as a scheduling event.
Read article ›
Reading a codebase in 48 hours
The scoping method: what we open first, the four signals that predict the rest, and what we deliberately ignore.
Read article ›
The architecture decisions you can safely defer
Reversibility is the only axis that matters early. What to defer, what to decide in week one, and how to write down the difference.
Read article ›
Fixed price vs time and materials, and why we sell fixed sprints
Fixed price or time and materials? What each contract rewards, what fixed bid, firm fixed price and cost plus mean, and when hourly is still right.
Read article ›
Why we publish our prices
What hidden pricing is actually for, what publishing costs us, and why the scoping call is better without a number hanging over it.
Read article ›
When to hire engineers, and when to buy sprint capacity
The true cost of hiring a software developer in year one, the ramp nobody budgets, and three questions that settle hire versus buy.
Read article ›
Shipping LLM features that survive contact with real users
Eval sets, latency budgets, structured output and fallback ladders: what separates an AI demo from a feature you can leave running.
Read article ›
What actually breaks in a Shopify Plus checkout at scale
The four failures we find most often on high-volume Shopify Plus checkouts, and the first-sprint fixes for each.
Read article ›One email per post, when it ships.
We publish when we have something worth saying. When a new post goes live, you get one email with the title, the opening paragraph, and a link. That's it.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Stop reading about sprints. Start shipping in one.
The scoping call takes 30 minutes and you talk to an engineer. Median four days from the call to the first commit, and the first 14 days are refundable.