Insights

Notes from the build.

Plain-spoken essays on software for the events industry — bookings, payments, operations, AI — and the engineering behind it.

21 September 2026 · 3 min read

It does everything except the one thing we actually needed.

Every platform demo looks like it was built for your business. The gap only shows up once you're running a real event through it, and by then you've already paid for the year.

Read the essay→

14 September 2026 · 4 min read

The day always looks fine by five o'clock.

Event day has a way of hiding its own damage. The queue moves, the gate closes, everyone goes home tired and relieved — and the actual cost doesn't show up until someone opens the numbers three weeks later.

Read the essay→

7 September 2026 · 3 min read

I only noticed when she went on holiday.

We had a booking system and an accommodation spreadsheet and twenty minutes of admin each evening to bridge the gap between them. It looked like admin. It was something else.

Read the essay→

31 August 2026 · 3 min read

The balance that's lying to you.

A healthy bank balance feels like breathing room. In events, it usually just means you're holding other people's money a little longer — and spending it is the mistake.

Read the essay→

24 August 2026 · 4 min read

Five years of bookings and I couldn't answer a simple question.

The ticketing platform keeps a perfect record of every transaction. It's your data in one sense, and not quite yours in another — and you usually find out which when it matters most.

Read the essay→

10 August 2026 · 3 min read

When your numbers don't match the supplier's numbers.

The admin takes time — everyone knows that. What's harder to see is that it also takes accuracy, and you don't usually find out when you've lost it until someone checks.

Read the essay→

3 August 2026 · 4 min read

What the brief never says.

The spec tells you what to build. It rarely tells you why the client is anxious, what failed last time, or which stakeholder will quietly derail the sign-off. White-label delivery depends on that context getting out of the account manager's head and into the engineer's.

Read the essay→

27 July 2026 · 4 min read

What lives in the joins.

The hardest bugs in a live system rarely live inside your code. They live in the gap between what your system believes happened and what a third-party API actually did.

Read the essay→

20 July 2026 · 4 min read

What the estimate is telling you.

A number at the bottom of a proposal is the compressed form of everything the person who wrote it knows — and everything they haven't thought about yet. Here's how to read one.

Read the essay→

15 July 2026 · 4 min read

Designing for the wrong answer.

A language model produces wrong answers with the same fluent confidence as correct ones. The engineering that matters isn't getting the demo to work — it's what happens in production when the answer is wrong.

Read the essay→

3 July 2026 · 5 min read

The white-label playbook.

How an outside engineer delivers under your brand without your client ever knowing — or needing to know. The mechanics, not the promises.

Read the essay→

3 July 2026 · 6 min read

You don’t need an AI team to sell AI.

Your clients are asking for AI and your agency doesn’t have it in-house. Here’s what’s actually sellable today — and how to deliver it without hiring.

Read the essay→

3 July 2026 · 5 min read

What “senior” actually buys you.

Every CV says senior. Here’s what the word means when real money is moving through the system — and how to tell a safe pair of hands from a title.

Read the essay→