Technology: insights from people who build products

An uptime promise has a price. How much downtime each target allows, the difference between an SLA and an SLO, what your cloud provider does and doesn’t promise, and the parts to build so a SaaS stays up.

On a short build there is no time for a test phase at the end. Here is how we set up QA from week one: a test environment for every feature, what to automate, the store testing windows to plan for, and the crash rates to hold before launch.

What a new company needs to know before it sells online in the EU: how many people already buy online, the six EU rules that become features in a store or marketplace, where each official page is, and the order we would build in.

The SaaS numbers worth tracking in your own product, grouped by who owns them: revenue for the CEO, operations for the COO, product and engineering for the CTO. Definitions, data sources and what to build before launch.

The 2022 list had ten DevOps tools. A startup needs six kinds. Here is what we would use for a new product in 2026, what each tool costs on its vendor’s own pricing page, and the setup to have before the first user arrives.

Most SaaS products don’t need a data lake in their first years. The signs that you do, what to run at each stage, 2026 prices for storage and queries, why file format matters more than size, and how to plan deletion before you collect.

What to settle before you build a travel marketplace: where the first hosts come from, what happens to the money at every booking state, how hosts get paid in many countries, and the price and package rules in the US and EU.

The 2022 list named PHP, Python, Java, Node.js and NestJS. All five are still used. This 2026 guide shows how to pick between them, which versions still get security fixes, and the stack we would start a new product on.

Part 3 of our customer development guide: seven ways to test a startup idea compared by time, cash and strength of evidence, a one-page brief you write before you spend, and a checklist that stops weak tests.

The app is the screen, remote and setup tool of most connected devices. How to pick the connection, what iOS 18 and Android 12+ ask for, which security rules apply in the UK and EU, and what a first version costs.

A CRM is where your team keeps every customer, deal and conversation. The software is the easy part. What to agree on before you pick one, what ready-made CRMs cost in 2026, and when custom parts pay off.

When low-code, no-code and AI app builders are enough, where they hit limits (custom logic, App Store rules, plugins, moving off), the signs you’ve outgrown one, and how to move without losing users or data.