Notes on Delivering Software Across Borders
Practical writing on the parts of a project that decide whether it holds up two years later: decision latency, data structure, compliance detail, and the industry decisions that are expensive to reverse.
7 articles
Every article is written from delivery work, not from a keyword list. Where a number would need a source we do not have, we describe the mechanism instead.
Construction Cost Control: Why the Gap Between Quote and Spend Grows
Estimating gets the attention, but the money is usually lost in the space between a variation being agreed on site and being recorded in the office. That space is a data problem, and it is fixed by design rather than by discipline.
Why Generic ERP Gets Abandoned in Family-Owned Businesses
The system is rarely rejected because it is wrong. It is rejected because using it correctly requires an approval chain that does not exist, so people route around it and the data becomes untrustworthy within a quarter.
Building Custom Software That Survives a GDPR Review
Compliance reviews rarely fail on the privacy policy. They fail on the data model: a field that was never classified, a backup that outlives the deletion request, an admin screen that shows more than it should. All three are engineering decisions made long before anyone reads the policy.
Working With a China-Based Development Team: Time Zones, Handover and What Actually Breaks
Most offshore projects do not fail because the team cannot code. They fail because decisions take four days to travel and nobody noticed the delay compounding. This is a description of how the gap actually behaves, and the working model that contains it.
Specifying a Restaurant POS System: Decisions to Make Before You Buy
Restaurant software is easy to demo and hard to live with. The decisions that cause trouble six months after launch are rarely about features — they are about how the menu is structured, how branches share stock, and which hardware is already bolted to the counter.
Website Localisation for Chinese-Owned Businesses: Language, Currency and Search
A translated website is not a localised one. Localisation is three layers — language, commercial convention, and search structure — and most projects do the first, skip the second, and break the third.
Is an AI Knowledge Base a Better Buy Than a Chatbot?
A chatbot answers; a knowledge base answers from your documents, with citations. For a business whose policies and SOPs new staff cannot find, the second is the purchase that survives an audit.
Where these notes apply
The articles describe problems; the solution pages describe how we scope them.
