Technical due diligence and system rescue
You inherited a system, or you are about to buy one, or the one you paid for stopped moving. Before anyone commits another quarter to it, it is worth knowing what is actually there.
A fixed-scope audit of a stalled or inherited system, delivered as a prioritized roadmap you can act on.
Where it actually goes wrong
Stalled projects are rarely stalled for the reason everyone agrees on. The visible symptom is a missed date; the cause is usually a specific, findable thing — an architecture that cannot support the next feature, infrastructure nobody can reproduce, or a functional gap between what was promised and what exists.
An audit is cheap relative to the decision it informs. It is also the only honest way to find out whether the right move is to continue, rewrite a part, or stop.
What you get
- A codebase and infrastructure read
- What is there, what state it is in, and what it will and will not support.
- A functional gap analysis
- The distance between what the system is believed to do and what it does.
- A prioritized roadmap
- Ordered by risk and value, scoped so someone can start on Monday.
- A straight recommendation
- Continue, remediate, or stop — with the reasoning attached, including when the answer is that you do not need me.
I will tell you when the answer is to stop, and when you do not need me. That is worth more to you than a roadmap that flatters the code you already paid for — and it is also where a fractional CTO arrangement fits, if ongoing technical leadership is the shape you need. It is an engagement model, not the practice.
Where I have done this
- A discovery engagement on a stalled system — codebase, infrastructure and functional gaps — delivered as a prioritized roadmap. The client acted on it and resumed development.
- The harder half of that same engagement is the reason this service exists. I was asked to keep a previous vendor's foundation and build on top of it. I agreed, and I should not have — it could not carry what the business needed, and no amount of good code on top was going to change that. The project was eventually paused.
- That is the failure mode an audit is for: not finding bugs, but telling you early whether the thing you have will get you where you are going.
- Codebase and infrastructure audit
- Functional gap analysis
- Prioritized remediation roadmap
- Legacy modernization planning
Describe it in a paragraph.
Tell me what the system is, what it is doing wrong, and what has to be true by when. I will tell you whether I am the right person for it — including when I am not.
The other three
- Integration & data migration
The promise is not that I will connect your systems. It is that your integration survives a replay, a spike, and an outage.
- Platform builds, zero to production
Built and shipped, not prototyped — auth, billing, tenancy, queues and observability included.
- AI systems that do real work
Sold on the auditing, cost control, idempotency and evaluation — the parts that decide whether it survives contact with production.