Figma file to SOC 2-ready beta
A funded team with a design system, a compliance deadline, and no platform. The previous contractor had left a prototype nobody could deploy twice the same way.
Next.js app on a typed API, Postgres with row-level security, audit logging wired from day one, and infrastructure in Terraform. Flagged releases from week three so compliance could review live rather than in screenshots.
A monolith unpicked without a freeze
Eight years of Rails, a deploy that took four hours, and a team afraid to touch routing. A previous big-bang rewrite attempt had been abandoned after nine months.
Strangler-fig migration: the highest-traffic routes moved to typed services behind the existing edge, with dual-write and backfill for the data. Characterization tests first, so undocumented behaviour was pinned before anything moved.
Retrieval that clinicians actually trust
A model answering from a document corpus with no way to tell a good answer from a confident one. Pilot users had stopped using it after the second wrong citation.
Rebuilt retrieval with structure-aware chunking and re-ranking, every answer citation-linked to its source span, and an eval suite run on each change. Abstention when confidence is low — the feature that brought pilot users back.
Java cold starts, quartered
A Spring API on Lambda where cold starts blew the latency SLO every morning, and the mitigation — provisioned concurrency everywhere — was the largest line on the cloud bill.
Migrated to GraalVM native-image with reflection configuration generated from the existing test suite, then removed provisioned concurrency. Same code, same framework, different runtime.
They told us what not to build. That saved us a quarter.