Guides Overview
Practical guides for planning software projects, making technology decisions, and working effectively with a development partner. Process, not theory.
How to Secure an API
This guide is for developers and technical leads building or hardening a production API. By the end you will know the layers of defence an API needs, how to think about authentication and authorisation as separate concerns, the input validation that catches the most common attacks, the transport and logging hygiene that supports the rest of the defence, and the...
Read guideHow to Rate-Limit an API
This guide is for developers and technical leads building an API that needs to defend itself against abuse, accidental overuse, and the noisy client that consumes all the capacity. By the end you will know which rate limiting algorithm to pick, how to scope limits to make them useful, what headers to return so well-behaved clients can self-regulate, and how...
Read guideHow to Handle Webhooks Reliably
This guide is for developers and technical leads building webhook receivers for production systems: Stripe events, Xero updates, Slack interactions, anything where another service posts data to your endpoint and expects it to be processed. By the end you will know how to verify signatures, handle duplicates safely, deal with the inevitable retries, log enough to debug a production issue...
Read guideHow to Design a Multi-Tenant Database
This guide is for engineers and architects building a SaaS product or any system that serves multiple isolated customers from a single application. By the end you will know the three main multi-tenancy patterns and the trade-offs between them. You will know when each one is the right choice, how to migrate between them later if growth changes the calculus,...
Read guideHow to Write a Software RFP
This guide is for anyone commissioning custom software who needs to put a project out to multiple vendors and compare the responses fairly. By the end, you will have a structure for the document, a clear sense of what to include and what to leave for conversation, and an understanding of why most RFPs produce padded, defensive quotes. It also...
Read guideHow to Scope an Internal Software Project
This guide is for the person inside a business who has been asked to “build something internal” and now has to turn a vague brief into a project that can actually be quoted, built, and used. By the end you will know how to pin down what the tool needs to do, what it does not, what to defer to...
Read guideHow to Plan a Multi-System Integration
This guide is for anyone whose business runs across three or more systems (CRM, accounting, project management, email, e-commerce, support) and needs them to share data without humans copying it across by hand. By the end you will know how to plan the integration architecture, decide which system is the source of truth for each piece of data, sequence the...
Read guideHow to Budget for Software Maintenance
This guide is for anyone who has just commissioned custom software, is about to, or is two years into owning one and trying to make sense of the ongoing costs. By the end you will know what maintenance actually covers, how to size the annual budget against the build cost, the line items that almost always get forgotten, and how...
Read guideHow to Run a Software Review Quarterly
This guide is for anyone who owns a piece of business software and wants to keep it improving in a structured way rather than reacting to whatever shouts loudest. By the end you will know how to run a useful quarterly review: what to look at, who to involve, how to prioritise what comes out of it, and how to...
Read guideHow to Manage Software Vendor Relationships
This guide is for anyone whose business runs on software they did not build themselves (SaaS subscriptions, hosting providers, third-party APIs, and managed services) and who is trying to get genuine value from those relationships rather than just paying invoices. By the end you will know how to structure the relationships, what to track, how to escalate when things go...
Read guideHow to Keep Your Software Secure After Launch
This guide is for anyone responsible for a piece of business software now that it is live, and trying to keep it from becoming a security problem six months in. By the end you will know the operational rhythms that matter: patching, access reviews, dependency upgrades, monitoring, incident drills, and how to set them up so that security is something...
Read guideHow to Handle Software Incidents
This guide is for anyone who has just discovered that production is broken and needs to know what to do next, or who is setting up incident response for a system before the first incident happens. By the end you will have a structured way to triage, communicate, fix, and learn from incidents, along with a sense of which patterns...
Read guideHow to Plan a Data Migration
This guide is for anyone responsible for moving business data from one system to another: a CRM, a database, a custom application, or anything where records have to land in a new home without losing information or integrity. By the end you will know how to audit the source data, design the mapping, build the transformation logic, run test migrations,...
Read guideHow to Onboard a Software Team Into Your Business
This guide is for anyone bringing an external development team or a new internal team onto a business for the first time, and trying to get from contract signed to productive work without the usual three-month limbo. By the end you will know how to hand over the context they need, what access to grant in what order, how to...
Read guideHow to Launch a Software Product Safely
This guide is for anyone running the go-live of a custom software project, internal or external-facing, and trying to avoid the launch-day disasters that turn a successful build into a damaged reputation. By the end you will know how to prepare in the days leading up to launch, how to choose between cutover styles, what to monitor in the first...
Read guideHow to Handle User Acceptance Testing
This guide is for anyone responsible for getting a piece of custom software signed off by the business before it goes live, and trying to make UAT something more useful than “the client clicks around for a week and emails complaints”. By the end you will know who should be testing, how to structure the tests so they actually exercise...
Read guideHow to Evaluate an AI Agent for Your Business
This guide is for operators considering an AI agent for a specific business process and trying to separate genuine fit from hype. By the end you will know how to test whether an agent is the right tool for the job, what accuracy you actually need, how to think about oversight and failure, and which categories of work agents are...
Read guideWhen to Modernise vs Replace
This guide is for anyone running software that no longer fits the business but has not yet collapsed under its own weight, and trying to decide whether to fix what is there or start again. By the end you will have a structured way to weigh the two paths, a sense of where each one actually wins, and a clearer...
Read guideAbout Our Guides
The Difference Between Reading About Software and Planning It Properly
There is no shortage of content about software development online. Blog posts about agile methodology, articles about choosing a tech stack, listicles about project management tools. Most of it is written by people selling something, and almost none of it helps you actually plan a project, write a brief, or make a technology decision you will not regret in eighteen months.
These guides are different because they come from the other side of the table. We are the development company that receives briefs, evaluates RFPs, scopes MVPs, and plans migrations. We know what good preparation looks like because we see the difference it makes every week. A client who arrives with a well-structured brief and realistic budget expectations starts their project two to three weeks ahead of one who arrives with a vague idea and a number they found on Google. That gap compounds throughout the engagement. Better preparation leads to fewer revisions, fewer scope changes, and a system that more closely matches what the business actually needs.
Every guide here follows the same approach: define what you are deciding or planning, understand the trade-offs, work through the questions that matter, and arrive at something concrete you can act on. They are written for business owners, operations leads, and project stakeholders: the people making decisions about software, not the people writing it. There is no jargon for its own sake, no theoretical frameworks that fall apart in practice, and no advice that requires you to already know the answer.
The guides below span the full range of decisions that happen before and during a software engagement. You will find planning guides that walk through scoping, budgeting, briefing, and migration preparation. Decision guides that give you frameworks for build versus buy, partner selection, and legacy system assessment. Implementation guides for the practicalities of working with a development team. And operational and technical guides for the ongoing concerns that outlast any single project. Together, they cover the ground between “we need something built” and a clear plan that a development team can work from.
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