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Scalability and Technology Consulting Advice for SaaS and Technology Companies

The Top 20 Mistakes in Technology

One of the most common questions we get asked is, “What are the most common technical failures you see development and product teams make?” To answer this question, we analyzed…

Pete Ferguson

· 13 min read

The Big Picture - Connecting Strategy to Architecture

Drawings Maps to Lead the Organization Startups SaaS companies can easily link their business strategy to their SaaS or eCommerce architecture. However, as companies grow beyond…

Phillip Seawright

· 4 min read

Guide to Optimizing Your Relational Data Model (Scalability Rule #31)

The base of this discussion is about building and maintaining a healthy data model. If executed improperly you may find yourself in a costly situation when demand out grows your…

Lauren Steel

· 10 min read

Why Is My Development Team So Slow?

We are commonly asked questions similar to this: “My company has doubled the size of the development team over the last couple of years, yet the development team seems to get…

Marty Abbott

· 7 min read

Scalability Rule 39: Feature Flags

In the book Scalability Rules: Principles for Scaling Websites (Abbott & Fisher), Chapter 9 (Design for Fault Tolerance and Graceful Failure) includes rule 39, Ensure You Can Wire…

Greg Fennewald

· 4 min read

CEO Guide to Optimizing Technology Organizational Structure

The What and Why of Technology Organizational Structure Technology and Product organizational structures commonly oscillate between: Centralized and decentralized (single monolithic…

Heather Abbott

· 11 min read

Don't Rely on QA to Find Mistakes

A few years back, my husband and I moved from California to Florida to start new jobs. With our children in tow, we said goodbye to the mountains and dry heat to a life of flat…

Victoria Wisot

· 5 min read

If It's Not Observable, It Can't be Released – Design To Be Monitored

Design To Be Monitored is one of those AKF architectural principles that resonates with many product engineering teams. After all, high availability, reliability, and visibility…

Dave Berardi

· 5 min read

Postmortems: Box Checker or Value Creator

When we evaluate the operations processes of clients, one of the subordinate processes we look at are postmortems. Postmortems are an expected component of problem management for…

Greg Fennewald

· 3 min read

Security Anti-Pattern: Firewall Frenzy (Firewalls, Firewalls Everywhere!)

This article is one of a series of security anti-patterns commonly found in our experience and during technical due diligences for investors, and workshops with our clients. A…

Pete Ferguson

· 5 min read

CEO Guide to Agile

What is Agile?Agile has different meanings to different audiences. For the majority of customers, Agile applies to the development of digital products or services. To help our…

Phillip Seawright

· 15 min read

Microservice Architecture Principle: One or Zero Databases Per Service

This post is a deeper dive on the AKF Microservice Architecture Principle “One or Zero Databases per Service”. The Predicates Microservice and services-oriented architectures…

Marty Abbott

· 3 min read

CEO Guide to Measuring Engineering Team Performance

What are Engineering Team Performance metrics?To CEO’s, especially those with a non-technical background, the Engineering organization can be a bit of a black box. That black…

Heather Abbott

· 12 min read

Security anti-pattern: Gatekeeper – i.e. Department of “No”

This is the second in a multi-part series on information security anti-patterns. Too often in our technical due diligence and workshop engagements we encounter development teams…

Pete Ferguson

· 4 min read
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