Continuous-delivery fractional CTO

One-week express audit as technical due diligence

Founders preparing to raise, and investors evaluating a company, need an unbiased technical picture fast. One of our experts runs a one-week express audit: the client picks focus areas (security, compliance, infrastructure cost and reliability, development practices, UX), the expert gets read-only access under NDA, and after a week delivers an actionable report and walks through what to tackle first. Deeper audits and help with fixes follow if needed.

Zero-downtime database migrations on continuously deployed products

Teams that deploy daily can't take the site down for schema changes, yet adding, renaming or dropping a column can break the old app version still running during a rolling deploy. One of our experts uses a phased approach on their projects: each migration is split so the running version always stays compatible with the new schema, with extra care for heavy operations on large tables. Their teams roll out schema changes without downtime as routine.

Continuous delivery from day one

New products often leave deployment until the end and then struggle to launch. On new projects, one of our experts sets up the production environment first and has teams ship daily, often several times a day: infrastructure as code (Terraform/CloudFormation), automated tests up to end-to-end, linters, type checkers and security scanners, fully automated zero-downtime pipelines kept fast, and production monitoring. Clients can demo to investors at any time and launch as soon as the essentials are in.

Replacing staging with feature flags and safe testing in production

Staging environments drift from production in code, configuration and data, slow continuous integration down, and still let bugs through. One of our experts moves teams to safe testing in production: feature flags that emulate staging, early-access programs, release flags, canary deployments and dark launches. Teams test exactly the code and data users get. They keep staging only where developers have no production access, such as on-premise software.

Lean monitoring starter pack for new products

Small teams get lost choosing between infrastructure, APM, error, uptime and business-metric monitoring. For new projects, one of our experts starts with two layers: error monitoring that posts exceptions to the team chat, and external uptime checks that catch outages the app can't report itself. More layers come as the product matures.

Cloud cost reduction through application-level changes

Cloud bills grow faster than revenue. Beyond the usual right-sizing, reserved capacity and cleanup, one of our experts looks at how the application itself works, because that's where the biggest savings usually hide. Initial findings come within a few days with read-only access. In their experience, first-time optimizations usually save at least a third of the bill and often around half, without hurting uptime.

High-traffic media sites that survive spikes

Media sites live on page speed and get hit by sudden traffic spikes. Under one of our experts' technical leadership, teams have built and run sites that together serve hundreds of millions of visitors a month: backend and frontend performance, page structure, caching and media formats tuned for good Core Web Vitals, and architectures that scale for viral moments without runaway cloud bills.

E-learning platforms with portable learning content

Learning platforms must play content authored elsewhere and add their own engagement and analytics. Teams led by one of our experts have launched dozens of online learning sites serving millions of students, working deeply with the SCORM, xAPI and cmi5 standards, including an LMS for a public-safety training provider.

HIPAA-ready healthcare product with EHR integration

A clinical-workflow startup needed a web application that handles protected health information and talks to electronic health records. Under one of our experts' technical supervision, the team built a Django application with EHR integration; on a separate healthcare platform they built on AWS with payment and CRM integrations. The expert designs for HIPAA, HL7 FHIR integrations and high reliability, and keeps AI features human-in-the-loop.

What engineering leaders do about AI-written code

Everyone is shipping AI-written code; few know how others keep it safe. One of our experts polled dozens of engineering leaders across North America and Europe. Every respondent had AI-written code in production. Security, code quality and losing understanding of the codebase were the top concerns, and roughly four in ten had already had a security incident. Nearly all reviewed AI code at least as strictly as human code, with human review and security scanners as the main safeguards. The expert applies the same rule in their own teams: engineers use AI but stay accountable for what ships.

Authentication provider migration across a product suite

A company had to move a whole suite of products to a new authentication provider without disrupting users. A team under one of our experts' technical leadership carried out the migration across the suite; the client reported being satisfied with both the work and the relationship.

Faster CI/CD pipeline for a mobile-monetization company

A slow pipeline was holding back releases. A team under one of our experts' leadership optimized the client's CI/CD pipeline; the founder-CTO praised the communication, reasonable timelines and extra effort. Pipeline speed matters to this expert because a fast enough pipeline makes a separate rollback procedure unnecessary: you just ship the fix.

Turning a vibe-coded MVP into a production product

A non-technical founder vibe-coded an MVP that got early interest, but features break each other, some pages are slow, and nobody can answer "is it secure?".

A short audit of code, data model, security and infrastructure; then set up continuous delivery, tests where they give the most confidence, and error plus uptime monitoring, and decide what to keep.

Testing strategy review: confidence, speed, effort

A team argues about test pyramids and coverage targets while bugs still reach production and the suite gets slower.

Look at which bugs the tests catch and which escape, measure suite speed, and rebalance unit, integration and end-to-end tests per feature for the most confidence at reasonable speed and effort.

Planning with deadlines and flexible scope instead of estimates

A team keeps missing estimates and spends too much time producing them.

Switch date-bound work to fixed time and budget with flexible scope: list features as independently shippable pieces, prioritize them, make sure CD is in place, ship the most important first and keep the system working at all times.