services /03 · consulting & architecture
Clarity before code.
Audits, architecture reviews, and straight answers from engineers who have shipped, broken, and fixed systems for two decades. We tell you what we'd do if it were our money.
01 // engagements
Four ways to borrow
our judgment
Architecture review
Your system mapped, stress-tested on paper, and ranked by blast radius, before it fails in production.
Delivery audit
Where the roadmap actually is, why it slipped, and what it takes to land. Numbers, not vibes.
Fractional CTO
Senior technical judgment in your leadership meetings, without the full-time hire or the recruiter fee.
Embedded acceleration
Our seniors pair inside your team for a quarter, until the habits stick and the velocity is yours.
02 // what you leave with
A report people
actually read
Every review ships in two altitudes: an engineering deep-dive with code references, and a board summary in plain language. Same findings, no jargon tax.
- Architecture map of what you actually run
- Risk register, ranked by blast radius
- 90-day action plan with named owners
- Build-vs-buy scorecards for open decisions
- Recorded walkthrough your team can replay
delivery audit · excerpt
client redactedFinding 04 · Deploys to require 11 manual steps across 3 owners. One is on sabbatical.
Finding 07 · Staging drifts from production by config keys. Last full sync: 7 months ago.
Finding 11 · Bus factor of 1 on the payments service. is the only engineer who can deploy it.
Finding 12 · Caching one hot query would cut checkout latency by roughly 220ms. An afternoon of work.
fig. 04 · full reports run 20–40 pages
03 // asked often
Fair questions,
straight answers
Anything else, ask by email. A human replies, usually the engineer who'd run your review.
No. Most audit clients execute with their own teams. About a third later ask us to build; we like those odds and never force them.
Two versions ship together: an engineering deep-dive with code references, and a plain-language board summary. Same findings, different altitude.
Always. NDAs are signed before we see a single repository, and excerpts like the one above are only ever published anonymized, with permission.
Read-only: repositories, CI logs, cloud billing, and 45-minute interviews with four to six people. We never need production data.
Push back. Every finding comes with the evidence that produced it. If your context changes the conclusion, we revise the report, not our ego.
“The audit paid for itself before it ended: page 6 cancelled a $180k platform migration nobody could justify.”
$ devservices review --scope "architecture"
Get the second opinion first.
Tell us what decision you're facing: a rewrite, a scale-up, a vendor, a hire. We'll tell you what we'd need to look at, and what it costs to know.