How to Decide What to Automate First
Most organizations pick their first automation project badly. They automate the process that annoys them most, rather than the one that would pay back first. Th...
Insights & Articles
Thinking out loud on software, strategy, and what actually works.
Practical articles from the Albright Labs team on development, automation, and running a technology business.
How to Build Software That Survives Five Years
Most software doesn't die from one bad decision. It dies from a long sequence of reasonable ones. Building software that survives five years is mostly about avo...
Why Plugin-Driven CMSs Get Expensive at Scale
Plugin-driven content systems look cheap. They're cheap until the project is small. As an organization grows, the total cost of plugins, integrations, maintenan...
How AI Changes Code Review in a Long-Lived Codebase
Code review in a long-lived codebase is partly archaeology. AI accelerates the surface-level checks, but the institutional history reviewers carry is exactly wh...
What AI Can and Can't Do in Software Estimation
Software estimation is part research, part judgment, and part politics. AI helps with the research, struggles with the judgment, and has no role in the politics...
Where AI Saves Real Hours on a Small Dev Team
On a small dev team, every hour shows up in the schedule. AI saves real time in a narrow set of activities, mostly the unglamorous ones, and wastes time when ap...
How to Tell If You Need a Refactor or a Rewrite
Refactor and rewrite are two completely different projects with two completely different cost profiles and two completely different failure modes. Most organiza...
How to Evaluate AI Coding Tools Without Falling for the Demo
Every AI coding tool demos well. The interesting question is which ones survive three months of real work. A useful evaluation looks past the showcase and tests...
Build vs Buy: When a Custom App Beats a SaaS Subscription
SaaS is the right answer most of the time. Then it stops being the right answer, and most organizations notice years later than they should have. The build-vs-b...
When NOT to Use WordPress (And What to Use Instead)
WordPress excels at content publishing but struggles when projects behave like applications, require complex data relationships, or need long-term maintainabili...
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