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
Running Kibana with Sense
Lately we have been missing the Sense Chrome extension, basically because of the autocompletes when we are writing some Elasticsearch queries, or debugging something. It
Avoiding Conditionals, an example
I didn’t like the code I wrote for a particular feature. It was “notify users when someone comments in a discussion” with these requirements:
How we improved our PWA score by 53 points in 4 hours
A week ago Hannes and I attended PHPUK in London (You can read all about it here). We saw a lot of great talks and
How to integrate your Laravel app with Elasticsearch - 2017 edition
This article is an update (2017) of the How to Integrate your Laravel app with Elasticsearch original article from 2015. There is also an updated
PHP UK Conference 2017
Frederick and I (Hannes) went to PHP UK last week! I was invited to speak again, for the second year in a row. After attending
Basic understanding of text search in elasticsearch
Elasticsearch gets a lot of its power from how it works with analyzers and inverted indices. These inverted indices store your text data in a
PHP Conference Brasil 2016
Last week I attended the PHP Conference Brasil for the first time. It was awesome and I’m going to try to cover some of
A bird's eye view on API development
So an API, that’s just output of some JSON code right? No problem, my framework does that automatically. Or if you just want an
Introduction to domain driven design
As applications grow bigger and bigger, our codebase needs to accommodate for more and more business actions. After a while you will have code that
Concurrent HTTP requests without opening too many connections
I’ve been performing a talk on PSR-7 at PHP meetups and conferences. In that talk I demo the use of Guzzle to perform concurrent
How to build faceted search with facet counters using Elasticsearch
We all know them, search pages which allow you to filter through vast data sets by checking or unchecking filters. In most cases each filter
Commands, events, global functions and testing
The other day I was listening to the FullStackRadio episode 34 which is about dealing with dependencies in Active Record models. This is a very
On how to implement a code of conduct
Preface Recently there has been a lot of commotion around code of conducts and if a user group/open-source project should implement them or not.
Otto: First Impressions
A new tool called Otto came out recently. It’s a tool from Hashicorp. At the project homepage we can see the headline “meet the
Thread carefully
As far as I can remember, PHP has always had a terrible reputation at handling very heavy (or asynchronous) tasks. For a long while if
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