I was fixing a production bug late one night during my time at The Ignition Group. The bug was in a scheduled job that processed inbound data files, and I had traced the problem to a specific method in the data access layer. The fix itself was straightforward. What caught me was the git blame. … Continue reading The Player-Coach Has a Shelf Life
Engineering Leadership
Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 3: Scaling into the Cloud and through an Acquisition
By this point, the platform was doing what it was designed to do. The multi-tenant database had replaced a dozen separate client environments. The data access layer and reporting engine were generating several million dollars a year in revenue. The automation tooling had gotten the data team back on schedule. We'd grown from about a … Continue reading Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 3: Scaling into the Cloud and through an Acquisition
Every Small Company Is in One of Three Places with AI
A few months ago I was catching up with a consultant friend who works with small and mid-sized companies. He told me about a client, a founder running a small services company, who had asked him, almost sheepishly, "Should we be doing something with AI?" The founder had seen the headlines, watched competitors mention it … Continue reading Every Small Company Is in One of Three Places with AI
Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 2: The Product Architecture That Powered the Business
The multi-tenant database solved our scaling problem. Data updates that had previously taken weeks now flowed to subscribing clients automatically. Onboarding went from a technical project to a configuration exercise. The foundation was solid. But a database isn't a product. Our clients weren't paying for a well-designed schema; they were paying for access to healthcare … Continue reading Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 2: The Product Architecture That Powered the Business
Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 1: From a Dozen Databases to One
When I walked into The Ignition Group for the first time, the company had about a dozen paying clients and a proof of concept that had been duplicated for each of them. In one of our first conversations, the founder was straightforward with me: "We know this setup isn't going to work long-term. That's why … Continue reading Building a SaaS Platform from Zero, Part 1: From a Dozen Databases to One
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