The AI skills gap
In 40+ interviews, senior engineers from major banks and consultancies showed strong backgrounds but little real AI fluency. No RAG, no agent frameworks. The gap isn't about skill, it's about exposure.
The blog · since 2015
Insights for founders,
CTOs & investors.
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
Featured articles
What will the state of AI be like by this time next year?
Pricing strategies in the era of AI: why hourly billing no longer works
5 red flags for VCs when planning to invest in Seed or Series A companies
SaaS due diligence report: 12 learnings for founders that want to secure their next funding round
Things we do in our first weeks as Fractional CTO
Latest posts
How a CTO makes technology decisions
It’s time to build a new product. Some people within the organization have championed individual native applications built in Swift for iOS and Kotlin
Pulse: Episode 8 - Outdated documentation with Christophe Pasquier
In Pulse, a madewithlove podcast, Andreas talks with leaders from the tech startup and scale-up ecosystem. There are also some podcast episodes where Andreas talks
Setting up Laravel Horizon in Google Cloud Run
“Wait, what? Cloud Run is serverless!” I hear you shout in confusion as you jump out of your chair. Well, give me a chance to
Pulse: Episode 7 – Free Range Management with Steve Tauber
In Pulse, a madewithlove podcast, Andreas talks with leaders from the tech startup and scale-up ecosystem. There are also some podcast episodes where Andreas talks
Pulse: Episode 6 – Johann Romefort on Technical Due Diligence
In Pulse, a madewithlove podcast, Andreas talks with leaders from the tech startup and scale-up ecosystem. There are also some podcast episodes where Andreas talks
ChatGPT and the future of software specs
In case you just woke up from a coma and missed the news that’s whipping Tech Twitter into a frenzy, OpenAi just released ChatGPT.
It’s here: Free Range Management, the book
Create space so your team can thrive. You must create space for knowledge workers to do their best work. But how do you do that?
The evolution of technical roles
Many startups give the CTO title to their technical lead. We think that’s a mistake. There is an organic way to grow engineering teams
Don’t let QA be a bottleneck
Not every company can have a “move fast and break things” attitude. In fact, even Zuckerberg, who installed this as a mantra at Facebook in
Logging non-Laravel queries to Telescope
One of the legacy projects we are dealing with is using old-school mysqli queries all over the place. We have wrapped the application in a
When there isn’t plenty of fish in the sea: hiring and retaining tech talent
The shortage of skilled workers has been rising continuously in recent years. To be able to hire and retain scarce talent, we need to improve
Pusher alternatives for local development with Laravel Broadcasting
Recently, I built a proof of concept for a feature using Laravel’s Broadcasting feature. While I was familiar with its existence, it was my
Setting up infrastructure using HashiCorp Terraform, Laravel Forge and Cloudflare
DigitalOcean | Cloud Infrastructure for DevelopersAn ocean of simple, scalable cloud solutions.Cloud Infrastructure for DevelopersDave McCarthyResearch Vice President, IDC If you’ve used Terraform before
Typescript, Vue 3, and strongly typed props
After working with React (and TypeScript) for a long time, I’ve recently been contributing to a Vue application. While I felt right at home
AI & agentic tooling
AI-first engineering
We use AI and agentic workflows daily. From coding agents to AI strategy, we help teams adopt what actually works.
Read our AI insightsEngineering leadership
CTO Insights
We <3 sharing content for CTOs, senior engineers and founders with real-world insights.
40+ expert authorsFor investors & VCs
Due diligence done right
Technical audits, codebase assessments, and risk analysis for portfolio managers making investment decisions.
Explore our investor content
How we help
Software engineering
Our staff engineers will get your software (back) on track and lead your engineering team. We prepare our exit from day one: our goal is to bring the software and the team to the right level for us to get out again.
Learn more about software engineeringCTO as a service
Our CTOs in residence (or fractional CTOs) inject technical leadership into your team, ensuring the technical aspect of your business gets exactly the right attention.
Learn more about CTO as a serviceAuditing
We're the market leader for technical due diligence of SaaS companies in Belgium and The Netherlands, servicing clients all over the world. Investors appreciate our smooth process, sharp opinions and top-notch reports.
Learn more about auditingCTO Coaching
Behind-the-scenes support for your CTO or technical lead to enhance their skills, drive effective change, and grow their teams confidently.
Learn more about CTO coachingRecruiting
We can help you find the best talent to join your team. Unlike other recruiters, we are CTOs and software engineers ourselves, and through getting our hands dirty, we know the skills required to make an impact.
Learn more about recruitingProduct management
Sometimes your struggles go beyond the technical. Do you need help evaluating the roadmap or sharpening the vision? What should you build in order to scale? Our product management experts know the way.
Learn more about product management