Practical notes from delivering software for governments and regulated organisations. Written by the engineers who did the work.
Notes from eight years of delivery, 2018 to today.
Latest · · 8 min read
Almost every proposal promises that data stays inside the country. Few describe the architecture that makes the promise true. This is the sequence we walk through before build starts, the trade-offs it forces, and the tests an evaluation committee can run before acceptance.
2026 · · 7 min read
A government system should outlive its vendor. Here is the checklist we work through item by item, how each one is tested rather than asserted, what it costs both sides, and the cases where a strict handover is the wrong thing to demand.
2026 · · 7 min read
Flipping a layout at the end of a project produces software citizens tolerate. Designing for Arabic from the first screen produces software they use. Here is what actually changes in the type, the data model and the test plan, and what it costs to do it properly.
2025 · · 7 min read
Scanning decades of land records is the easy part and the cheap part. The project is deciding which of three contradictory versions of a record is true, recording why, and doing it in a way department staff will stand behind.
2024 · · 7 min read
Qudrat and Tahsili preparation lives or dies on fidelity: exact timing, exact question behaviour, and progress a student actually believes. What we built, what we deliberately refused to build, and what transfers to any assessment system.
2023 · · 7 min read
Not the models. Disks, drivers, clock drift and people leaving. Five years of running detection inside a client data centre, and the operating practices, contract clauses and acceptance tests that came out of it.
2022 · · 7 min read
Expired cards and bank declines end more subscriptions than unhappy customers do. This is the mechanics of recovering them: what the decline codes mean, how to schedule retries, when to stop, and why a government fee portal has the same problem.
2021 · · 7 min read
One name can be written five ways, and a registry that returns nothing for a citizen who exists has failed. What normalisation actually involves, where it must not be applied, and the acceptance test to write into a tender.
2020 · · 7 min read
Spring 2020 multiplied our traffic in weeks. The order things broke in, the decisions that held, the emergency choices we had to unwind afterwards, and how the whole episode became a runbook we now hand to government clients.
2019 · · 6 min read
Quizplus started with a content model and a billing system, not a feature list. The structural decisions that let it reach millions of students, the ones that cost us, and why we now use the same sequence on government work.
2018 · · 7 min read
Phone and seat-belt detection at national scale in 2018, written for the people who now evaluate proposals like it: what the cameras had to do, how the dataset was built, why the review loop matters more than the model, and what the whole thing costs to keep running.
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