Articles.

Inheriting an undocumented system starts with understanding what already runs in production

Inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code? The first two weeks

The first two weeks on an undocumented legacy codebase: boot it from scratch, instrument production, map the five revenue paths. And why the day-4 rewrite call backfires.

Aug 14

The most expensive rule in the company usually lives in two places: this whiteboard and one person's head

Technical debt you cannot see: measuring cognitive debt

The most expensive technical debt is the rule only one person can explain. A 40 minute test to find that concentration, and what to do once it shows up.

Aug 26

No contractor prices a foundation before the soil test. In software, the drill is opening the piece nobody has looked at.

How to respond when you are asked for an estimate

Answer with a range, the part nobody has measured yet, and the date you tighten the number. Why the deadline question fails and what to measure first.

Aug 21

Before the first member goes up, the structure already has stamped drawings and a signature behind it

Why can't IT deliver big projects on time like construction?

Construction slips too. Three contract devices explain the gap: a paid design phase, signed change orders with measurement, and one named engineer of record.

Aug 28

8min read

One line in the rate table can hold three completely different deliveries

Brazil software development hourly rates 2026: ranges by model

Freelance, dev shop and embedded squad rates out of Brazil in 2026, plus what disappears from the delivery when a vendor agrees to match a lower price.

Aug 17

PR volume went up and the review queue is where the AI gain disappears.

AI teams ship more code and deliver less: what to measure

PR volume is up and the product hasn't moved. Four measurements that expose where AI turns into debt: review queue, 30-day rework, mutation score and real customer use.

Aug 19

The fifth question is the one nobody answers without opening the repository

Building With AI When You Don't Know Architecture: 5 Checks

Building with AI without architecture breaks around month six. Five checks you can run without reading code, what each answer means, and the cheaper path before a rewrite.

Sep 4

A laptop, financial reports, and cash on a desk: the numbers a deal gets weighed by.

The code that passes the pitch and fails due diligence

I talked to founders who went through technical diligence and watched the term sheet shrink — not over the product, but over the paperwork, the code's ownership, and everything nobody had read with a buyer's eyes. Why the time to fix it is long before the round.

Aug 12

Raquel Reis

The rule that decides commission usually lives in three places at once, with different values

Thousands of IF/THEN/ELSE rules: code, engine or spreadsheet

Rules that change weekly belong in versioned data with an owner. Rare rules stay as ifs. When a rules engine pays off, and what the finance spreadsheet really costs.

Aug 31

8min read

The lock is solid. That counts for nothing when the key was left in the door and anyone can turn it.

I changed one number in the URL and saw another customer's orders

A client asked me for a second opinion on the app another shop had shipped. Twenty minutes in, changing one number in the address bar, I was reading another company's order on his platform. Login worked; authorization didn't. On the cheapest hole to prevent and the most expensive to find late.

Aug 10

The platform everyone called obsolete can still tell you what it did yesterday

Mainframe and AI: legacy is missing logs and owners, not age

CIO Dive reports AI agents helped sustain confidence in the mainframe. Three checks that tell you whether your system is legacy, and what to do about each one.

Sep 2

When to kill a product: a 4-question framework for founders

Killing a product is the most-avoided strategic decision by founders. Result: capacity consumed by a product already lost — months later, a pivot that could have happened in weeks. See the 4-question framework a senior squad uses to lead the conversation.

May 1

AI without discipline doubles bugs; AI with review gates cuts 30%. The difference is process

Squads that adopted AI without discipline doubled production bugs — analysis of 80 teams

AI coding assistant adoption without review gates multiplied production bugs across 80 squads observed in 2025. Squads that adopted WITH discipline cut bugs by 30%. See what separates the two groups.

Mar 6

3 new vectors arrived with AI in production — a senior squad addresses them from day 1

Security in AI environments: prompt injection, data leakage, and supply chain

3 new vectors arrived in 2025 with AI products: prompt injection, context leakage, and model supply chain. A senior squad treats them as platform decisions from day 1. See the 3 vectors and the right controls.

Mar 27

Market median for PR review is 14h; top quartile (Revin) is < 4h. The gap = process

Pull request review time in remote teams: 2026 benchmark

Revin compiled PR review time from 100 remote squads in 2025. Market median: 14h. Top quartile (where Revin operates): < 4h. Long tail: 48h+. The difference is not talent — it is process. See benchmarks by team size and model.

May 8

The math behind a squad has less mystery than most proposals suggest

How much does a development squad cost in 2026?

From $12,000 to $22,000 a month, depending on team composition. That is the pricing Revin publishes on its site. Here I open up the math: what goes into a managed squad monthly fee, what the market charges in 2026, and the three questions that deflate a padded proposal.

Jul 23

The picture every proposal sells: the team gathered and aligned. Security, though, isn't decided around the meeting table. It's decided in the code.

Security isn't a feature you bolt on. It's how the team works.

There is one line in almost every software proposal I read: "we'll handle security later". That "later" has a date and a price, and it is rarely the person who promised it who pays. Why security is a team habit, not a backlog item, and how to spot it before you sign.

Jun 12

Raquel Reis

Every software bottleneck starts small and becomes scenery. A fifty-minute deploy was never a decision, it was an accumulation.

I inherited a 50-minute deploy, and it was the best news in the audit

When Revin stepped into this client, the production deploy took fifty minutes and nobody could say why. It took me a while to see the number was not the problem, it was the symptom. Here is what was underneath, and why a slow deploy costs far more than it looks.

Jun 26

A desk in the dark, lit only by a monitor with code open and a sticky note that reads "DO IT": the product keeps running while no one is watching.

Who Found the Outage First — You or Your Customer?

The vendor dashboard was green while checkout was down. The problem is not that systems fail, it is the order people find out: the customer before the vendor you pay to watch it. On why real monitoring measures symptoms, not CPU.

Jul 31