# Notes from the work.

Patterns we keep seeing on the way to production. Written for the people whose name is on the change ticket.

1. [2026.04.25  
   MIGRATION  
   **The 60% migration. Why it stalls, and what finishing actually costs.**  
   The last 40% is rarely technical. Four shapes of stalled migration we keep being asked to recover, and the price of doing each one twice.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/the-sixty-percent-migration/index.html)

2. [2026.04.09  
   FINOPS  
   **A FinOps maturity model, ranked by how much it survives a tag audit.**  
   Six checkpoints for where a cloud-cost relationship actually sits — not where the quarterly slide says it does. Ranked by what holds up under scrutiny.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/finops-maturity-tag-audit/index.html)

3. [2026.03.26  
   DATA-AI  
   **The data plumbing AI products forget to plan for.**  
   Most AI features fail at the ingest, lineage, and retrieval layers — not at the model. A field guide to the data work that has to happen before the model layer is interesting.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/the-data-plumbing-ai-products-forget/index.html)

4. [2026.03.12  
   MODERNISATION  
   **Strangler-fig is a cutover strategy, not a refactor.**  
   The pattern is famous; the discipline that makes it work is not. Why most strangler-fig modernisations stall, and what changes when the team treats it as a cutover plan.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/strangler-fig-is-a-cutover-strategy/index.html)

5. [2026.02.26  
   FINOPS  
   **Reserved instances are not a strategy. Commitments are.**  
   Why a Savings Plan or Reserved Instance buy without a commitment ladder is just a long-dated bet — and how to build the ladder before the spreadsheet does.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/reserved-instances-are-not-a-strategy/index.html)

6. [2026.02.12  
   PLATFORM  
   **The platform team of two.**  
   Paved roads for the smallest plausible platform org. What to centralise, what to leave to product engineering, and what not to build at all.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/the-platform-team-of-two/index.html)

7. [2026.01.29  
   OPS  
   **SLOs the rota will actually defend.**  
   Most SLOs are written for steering committees. The ones that survive are written for the engineer who'll get paged at 03:00. Six rules that separate the two.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/slos-the-rota-will-actually-defend/index.html)

8. [2026.01.15  
   STANDARDS  
   **What we'd refuse to ship.**  
   A short list of architectures, patterns, and promises we won't put our name on. Written so the answer is the same on day one and day ninety.  
   Read ↗](/content/insights/what-we-would-refuse-to-ship/index.html)