Short essays from the people who write the code. No SEO ghost-writing, no '5 ways AI will transform…' — just honest notes from running an engineering studio in Hong Kong since 2014.
The cheapest quote will almost always be the most expensive project. After a decade of inheriting other people's half-built systems, these are the ten questions we wish more founders asked before they signed the contract.
Read the essay →The cases where it works, the cases where it doesn't, and the spreadsheet we use to decide.
A real breakdown of where the money goes, with three real (anonymised) project budgets.
Why our default for HK SME work is still Postgres, Next.js and one cron job — not three new databases.
The minimum-viable evaluation harness we ship with every AI project. 200 lines of Python and a spreadsheet.
The five things we got wrong, the three things we got right, and the one thing the city does better than anywhere.
A short field guide to the warning signs in an IT vendor's deck — with examples from real ones we've been forwarded.
No promotional fluff. We send one piece of writing per month, on whatever the team is figuring out. Roughly 1,400 subscribers, mostly HK founders and operators.