Insights
Ideas, guides and perspectives on building with technology
Practical, no-nonsense insights on AI, software engineering, automation, the Microsoft ecosystem and digital transformation — from the Glaricx team.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Grounding Enterprise AI in Your Own Data
A practical guide to building Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems that ground large language models in your proprietary data, reducing hallucinations and turning AI into a trustworthy business tool.
Read articleScoping an MVP That Actually Tests Demand, Not Just Your Patience
How early-stage founders can define a minimum viable product around a single risky assumption, ship it fast, and learn whether the market truly wants what they are building.
Read articleHow to Modernise a Legacy System Without Disrupting the Business
A practical, low-risk playbook for replacing or rebuilding ageing business-critical software using the strangler pattern, phased migration and disciplined delivery.
Read articleCore Web Vitals in 2026: How Site Performance Drives Conversions and Search Rankings
A practical guide for business and technical leaders on why Core Web Vitals matter to revenue and visibility, and how to improve them without endless rebuilds.
Read articleSetting Up a Lean PMO That Accelerates Delivery Instead of Slowing It Down
How to design a project management office that adds genuine value through visibility, prioritisation, and capability building, rather than becoming a reporting bureaucracy that teams work around.
Read articleStaff Augmentation, Managed Services, or Project Outsourcing: Choosing the Right Engagement Model
A practical decision framework for technology leaders weighing staff augmentation against managed services and full project outsourcing, with the trade-offs that matter for control, speed, and risk.
Read articleData Migration Without Data Loss: Preserving Integrity When Moving Off Legacy Systems
A practical guide to migrating data off legacy systems without loss or corruption, covering profiling, reconciliation, cutover strategy and how to prove correctness to the business.
Read articleQuantifying Technical Debt: Turning a Vague Worry into a Board-Level Decision
A practical method for measuring, pricing and prioritising technical debt so that modernisation investment can be justified to the people who control the budget.
Read articleThe Strangler Fig Pattern: Modernising Legacy Systems Without a Big-Bang Rewrite
How to incrementally replace a legacy monolith using the strangler fig pattern, delivering value at every step while avoiding the cost and risk of a full rewrite.
Read articleAccessing Scarce AI and Cloud Skills Through Staff Augmentation
How technology leaders can secure rare specialist skills for AI, data, and digital transformation initiatives through staff augmentation, without the cost and delay of permanent hiring.
Read articleOnboarding Augmented Engineers Fast: A Playbook for Productivity in the First 30 Days
Practical steps technology leaders can take to integrate augmented engineers quickly, so added capacity turns into delivered value within weeks rather than months.
Read articleDesigning SaaS Unit Economics Into the Product From Day One
How founders and engineering leaders can build pricing, metering and cloud cost discipline into a SaaS product early, so healthy unit economics are engineered rather than hoped for.
Read articleSequencing a SaaS Build: From MVP to Product-Market Fit
A staged roadmap that helps founders and product leaders decide what to build first, what to defer, and how to reach product-market fit without over-engineering.
Read articleSingle-Tenant vs. Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture: How to Choose
A practical guide for founders and engineering leaders on selecting the right tenancy model for a B2B SaaS product, balancing cost, scale, security and customer demands.
Read articleRationalising a Sprawling Application Portfolio After Growth or Acquisition
A structured method for enterprises to untangle a fragmented, overlapping application estate after rapid growth or M&A, reducing cost and risk while improving the way the organisation runs.
Read articleControlling Cloud Costs Without Slowing the Business Down
A practical FinOps-led approach for enterprise leaders to bring cloud spending under control while preserving performance, resilience, and the freedom to innovate.
Read articleModernising Legacy Systems Without a Big-Bang Rewrite
A pragmatic approach for enterprise leaders to modernise ageing core systems incrementally, reducing risk while unlocking agility, lower running costs, and new capabilities.
Read articleWeb Accessibility After the European Accessibility Act: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders
What the European Accessibility Act means for your website, why accessible design is good business beyond compliance, and how to approach it without disruption.
Read articleHeadless and Composable Web Architecture: When It Pays Off and When It Does Not
A clear-eyed guide to headless and composable web architecture for leaders deciding whether to decouple their front end from their content and commerce systems.
Read articleStaying Patched and Current: A Practical Approach to Dependency and Security Maintenance
Outdated dependencies are one of the most common and avoidable sources of security breaches and costly migrations. This guide gives leaders a pragmatic routine for keeping software patched, current, and safe without breaking production.
Read articleThe True Cost of Owning Software: Why Maintenance Budgets Decide Whether a Launch Survives
Most software budgets stop at launch, yet the majority of an application's lifetime cost comes afterwards. This article shows leaders how to size, justify, and protect a maintenance budget so a successful launch does not quietly decay.
Read articleWriting a Support SLA That Protects the Business, Not Just the Supplier
A practical guide to structuring service-level agreements for application support, covering severity tiers, response versus resolution targets, business-hours coverage, and the metrics that keep a contract honest.
Read articleWhen to Hire, When to Outsource, and When to Bring in Fractional Engineering Leadership
A staged guide for founders on building early technical capacity, balancing in-house hires, outsourced delivery, and fractional leadership without overcommitting scarce cash.
Read articleChoosing a Startup Tech Stack You Won't Regret in Eighteen Months
A founder-friendly framework for selecting technologies that fit your stage, team, and runway, avoiding both premature over-engineering and decisions that cap your growth.
Read articleTest Data Management: The Overlooked Bottleneck in Reliable Testing
Most testing problems trace back not to the tests but to the data they run on. This guide explains how to manage test data and environments so that your testing is realistic, repeatable, and compliant with privacy law.
Read articleShift-Left Testing: Building Quality Gates Into Your CI/CD Pipeline
Catching defects after a feature is built is the most expensive way to find them. This guide explains how to move quality earlier through shift-left testing and automated quality gates in your delivery pipeline.
Read articleWhen to Automate a Test (and When Not To): Building a Test Suite That Pays for Itself
Test automation only delivers a return when it is aimed at the right checks. This guide gives business and technical leaders a practical framework for deciding what to automate, how to structure a maintainable suite, and how to measure the payback.
Read articleManaging Software Project Dependencies: Why Cross-Team Coordination Decides Delivery Dates
A practical guide to identifying, sequencing, and actively managing the dependencies between teams and systems that, more than any single team's velocity, determine when complex software actually ships.
Read articleRescuing a Project in Trouble: A Structured Recovery Playbook for Stalled Initiatives
A practical recovery framework for getting a late, over-budget, or drifting project back under control, covering diagnosis, stabilisation, replanning, and the governance needed to prevent a relapse.
Read articleOn-Device AI: When to Run Machine Learning Inside Your Mobile App
Running AI directly on the phone, rather than in the cloud, can mean instant responses, offline capability, and stronger privacy. Here is how to judge when on-device intelligence is the right architecture.
Read articleBuilding Mobile Apps That Respect Privacy: Security and GDPR by Design
Mobile apps handle sensitive data on devices you do not control. This guide explains how to build security and GDPR compliance into the architecture from day one, not bolt it on before launch.
Read articleNative, Cross-Platform, or Hybrid? A Decision Framework for Your Mobile App
Choosing between native, cross-platform, and hybrid mobile development shapes your cost, performance, and roadmap for years. This framework helps decision-makers choose with confidence rather than by default.
Read articleBuilding Business-Ready AI Agents with Copilot Studio on the Power Platform
A practical look at how Copilot Studio lets organisations build AI agents grounded in their own data and connected to real business actions, and what it takes to deploy them responsibly.
Read articleFrom Manual Back Office to Automated Workflow: Calculating ROI on Power Automate
A practical guide for operations leaders on identifying high-value automation candidates with Power Automate, choosing between cloud flows and RPA, and building a defensible return-on-investment case.
Read articleGoverning the Power Platform at Scale: Building a Center of Excellence
How to let business teams build low-code apps on the Microsoft Power Platform without losing control, through a practical Center of Excellence covering governance, security, and lifecycle management.
Read articleThe True Cost of Custom Software: Budgeting Beyond the Build
A clear-eyed guide to the total cost of ownership of custom software, helping finance and technology leaders budget realistically and protect long-term ROI.
Read articleBuild vs. Buy: A Practical Decision Framework for Custom Software
A structured way for business and technical leaders to decide when custom software outperforms off-the-shelf SaaS, and how to make the call with confidence.
Read articlePreparing for the EU AI Act: A Practical Compliance Roadmap for AI Adopters
The EU AI Act introduces risk-based obligations for organisations that build or deploy AI. This roadmap explains the risk tiers and the concrete steps businesses across the EU and UK should take to prepare.
Read articleFrom Pilot to Production: Operationalising AI Agents in the Enterprise
Many organisations have impressive AI agent prototypes but few in production. This guide covers the reliability, governance, and engineering practices that move agentic workflows from demo to dependable operation.
Read articleAI features that actually ship: a practical guide for product teams
Most AI projects stall at the demo. Here is how to get a useful, reliable AI feature into production.
Read articleWhat your MVP should — and shouldn't — include
The fastest path to learning is a focused MVP on a codebase you can scale. Here is how to scope one.
Read articleHow to evaluate an offshore development partner: a 2026 checklist
The signals that separate a real engineering partner from a body shop — and the questions to ask before you sign.
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