Engineering Culture

Over the past three years, Harbor Software has conducted technical due diligence on 11 software acquisition targets for private equity firms and strategic acquirers. The deal sizes ranged from $2 million to $45 million. We have recommended proceeding on 7 of those deals, recommended against

After reviewing approximately 3,000 pull requests over the past six years, I am convinced that most code reviews are performative. The reviewer skims the diff, leaves a comment about a variable name, approves, and moves on. The author addresses the naming nit, merges, and ships

Most test suites are theater. They pass, the CI badge is green, everyone feels good, and then a customer reports a bug that slipped through 400 tests without triggering a single failure. After eight years of writing tests across ML platforms, SaaS products, and security

The most impactful skill a software engineer can develop is not a programming language, a framework, or an architectural pattern. It is the ability to communicate effectively with people who do not write code. I have watched brilliant engineers build the wrong thing because they

Commercial social media monitoring tools like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and Mention charge $500-$3,000/month and still miss the signals that matter most to your business. They excel at volume metrics and sentiment pie charts. They fail at detecting emerging narratives, tracking competitor positioning shifts, and surfacing

A study from the University of California, Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to full cognitive focus after an interruption. That number has been cited so often in productivity articles that it has become background noise.

In early 2023, deploying a WordPress site at Harbor Software took an average of 47 minutes. That included SSH-ing into the server, pulling the latest code from the Git repository, checking for file permission issues that seemed to appear randomly, running database migrations while holding

Technical teams are bad at client communication. This is not a personality flaw or a skills gap that a two-hour workshop can fix. It is a structural problem rooted in how engineers think about information. Engineers optimize for precision and completeness. Clients optimize for clarity