How to hire a software development agency: a founder's checklist
What to ask before signing with a software agency, what a good proposal contains, and the red flags we see when founders come to us after a bad first attempt.
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Notes from building production software
Specific, practical posts on the problems we solve for clients: payments, multi-tenant architecture, serverless AWS, data integrity and AI features. No fluff, no listicles.
Subscribe via RSSServerless or containers for a startup backend? How we decide
We run both: Lambda and DynamoDB for some clients, Rails and Django on containers for others. The questions that actually decide it, and the ones that don't.
Stop generating SQL. Give the model typed tools instead.
Designing the AI agent for a beauty booking marketplace: typed tools over the API, a role-derived tool list, and approval before every write.
Scheduled Stripe Connect payouts: the timezone bug that moves money
Hourly marketplace payouts sound simple until daylight-saving time shifts your cutoff by an hour. Scheduling payouts with IANA zones and making retries safe.
Fail-closed exports: when your report should refuse to run
Audit exports that silently ship wrong totals are worse than none. The reconciliation pattern we use so an export fails loudly when the numbers disagree.
Multi-tenant Django done properly: schema-per-tenant with PostGIS
Why we chose schema-per-tenant isolation for a construction SaaS, how to keep JWTs tenant-aware, and the custom backend that makes PostGIS geofencing work.
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