X-Ray

As a seasoned tech startup CTO and technical consultant, I've seen countless companies need more certainty about their technical solutions.

They're still determining if they're on the right track with their technology, tooling, infrastructure, 3rd party services, providers, and practices.

This might just be you, and I can help.

The symptoms

Sometimes, you feel that the engineering team needs help to keep up with delivering features, all code changes have unexpected side effects, and your infrastructure is getting very expensive or unstable.

You start having doubts that all the choices, shortcuts, and solutions chosen by your tech teams are well-balanced, appropriate, and generally suitable.
Your product got under a magnifying glass when an external auditor or due diligence company zeroed in on it.

This happens to companies of all sizes and backgrounds.
I have worked with clients going through difficult times in various stages of their lives, maturity, and exposure:

• Series A startups realize they have built an MVP that is difficult or impossible to turn into an actual product.
• Later-stage startups are having difficulty scaling, failing to introduce or adopt better engineering practices, always firefighting, and unable to reduce day-to-day toil.
• Corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees from various industries are getting a sudden cold shower and harsh reality check about their technology's (un)reliability.
• Companies with products that must comply and adhere to international standards (ISO27001, SOC2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA) want peace of mind before committing to the due diligence process.

I have helped them get through these situations by analyzing and understanding their tech landscape, the markets they operate, their regulations, and the engineering teams' working methods.

Most importantly, I provided actionable insights and recommendations, both for strategic positioning and long-term improvements and gains, and in the meantime, addressing acute pain by adopting acceptable tradeoffs, workarounds, and shortcuts.

I realized I could efficiently help many more companies and used my experience as a startup CTO to launch X-Ray publicly.

Like a regular X-ray, health checking your tech should be holistic, accessible, cross-cutting, reliable, and quick to execute.

By performing these health checks in several companies, I came to realize that many of my clients struggle on similar fronts:

• not designing the right solutions, not thinking about features
• not architecting with security and scalability in mind
• not focusing on developer productivity
• not having good processes, like automated testing, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and observability
• not using SaaS offerings, wherever possible and focusing on core business
• not using the cloud platforms enough or misusing them
• not using the right technology for the right job
• not optimizing on costs

Scoring low in these areas will cost you money, time-to-market, reputation, and potential legal fees and lawsuits.

How do I get an X-ray?

Since you are still reading this, you might be interested in this service.

Luckily, the process for getting your product checked by me in an X-Ray agreement is simple:

1) We jump on an exploratory call (schedule it here), where you tell me about your business and your challenges.
I am offering this for free since we must align our expectations and build mutual trust. After all, all relationships require a leap of faith.

2) I will give you a fixed price quotation and a timeline of execution depending on the project, the scope, and requirements.

3) We digitally sign a contract and an MNDA; I am granted read-only access to your codebase, infrastructure, project management tooling, and whatever service is relevant to the scope of the assessment.

4) I perform a tailor-made X-ray analysis of your product, and you get a PDF report with all the aspects that have been assessed.
In the meantime, we set up a direct communication line on Slack, where we can communicate efficiently.

In the case of remarks, you get a classification, severity rating, detailed description of the remark, evidence, and a clear recommendation on fixing or improving every entry in the assessment.

These remarks range from general opinions and recommendations, through recommendations from literature and developer community on adopting best practices, to highlighting critical vulnerabilities that might bring your company down any minute and put your business in immediate danger.

5) We schedule a follow-up call, and we discuss the report.

In the end, you decide whether my help is further required. Most of the time, clients ask me to tag along with their tech teams in a fractional capacity to make sure we tighten all the loose screws and enable you to accelerate the business.

Click the button below to schedule your free consultation call with me.