Selecting a technology vendor without relying on the demo
Demonstrations show the path the vendor has rehearsed. A structured evaluation shows how the product handles your awkward cases.
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Blogs
Practical writing from the people doing the work.
Articles on the decisions that actually shape a project — architecture, cost, delivery and the trade-offs behind them.
100
Articles published
10
Topics covered
In-house
Written by our team
Delivery
Design
Implementing design tokens so a rebrand is a configuration change
Tokens turn visual decisions into named values shared by design and code. Naming them well is the whole trick.
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QA & Testing
Performance testing: finding the limit before your users do
Performance tests answer specific questions. Running load without a question produces numbers nobody can act on.
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Web Development
A practical route to WCAG 2.2 AA on an existing website
Accessibility remediation on a live site works best as a prioritised programme rather than an attempt to fix everything at once.
ZooBieDoo Infotech Engineering TeamRead
Drupal
Writing a custom Drupal module that other people can maintain
Custom modules are where Drupal projects accumulate their long-term cost. A few conventions keep them readable and upgradeable.
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Delivery
Estimating software you have not built before
A fixed price on genuinely novel work is a negotiation about who absorbs uncertainty. There is a more honest structure, and clients increasingly prefer it.
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Mobile
App store optimisation: getting found and getting installed
Store listings are a search and conversion problem. Most of the available improvement is in the first screenful.
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AI & Data
Automating document processing without losing accuracy
Extracting structured data from real-world documents is achievable. The engineering is in confidence thresholds and review design.
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Architecture
Event-driven architecture: decoupling without losing track
Events decouple producers from consumers and make the overall flow harder to see. Both effects are real and need managing.
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Web Development
Designing an API your own front end will not fight
Most internal API pain comes from a handful of decisions: resource shape, error handling, pagination and versioning. Getting them right early is cheap.
ZooBieDoo Infotech Engineering TeamRead
Drupal
Drupal theming with Twig: structure that survives a redesign
A Drupal theme is a long-lived asset. Template structure, naming and component boundaries determine how much of it survives the next visual refresh.
ZooBieDoo Infotech Engineering TeamRead
Cloud
Disaster recovery in the cloud: objectives, testing and honesty
A recovery plan that has never been executed is a document, not a capability. The test is the deliverable.
ZooBieDoo Infotech Engineering TeamRead
DevOps
Blue-green and canary deployments: reducing release risk
Progressive delivery limits how many users a bad release can reach. The mechanism matters less than having a rehearsed way back.
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Design
Information architecture: organising a site around how people search
Most navigation reflects the organisation chart rather than user intent. Card sorting and tree testing fix that cheaply.
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QA & Testing
API testing: the layer that gives the best return
API tests run faster than interface tests and break less often than unit tests when internals change. They are the most cost-effective layer for most systems.
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Web Development
Building a component library that survives contact with deadlines
Component libraries fail for organisational reasons more often than technical ones. Governance, escape hatches and adoption metrics decide the outcome.
ZooBieDoo Infotech Engineering TeamRead