Engineering on Seaway Labs

Why We Scope Before We Estimate

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every studio has a version of this story. A client comes in with a project, the studio sends back an estimate, work begins, and somewhere around week eight the estimate is revealed to be fiction. The budget doubles. The timeline slips. Relationships fray. Sometimes the project recovers; sometimes it does not.

The Real Cost of a Poorly Documented Codebase

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Technical debt has a perception problem. It gets discussed as a future concern — something to address when the product is bigger, the team is larger, there is finally a quiet quarter. There is never a quiet quarter.

The debt is accruing right now, in the absence of documentation, in the architectural decisions that exist only in the memory of whoever made them, in the code that has never been explained to anyone. The cost is not deferred. It is distributed invisibly across every hour your team spends working in the codebase.

React Native in 2025: When It Is Enough and When It Is Not

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The native-versus-cross-platform question gets asked at the start of almost every mobile engagement we take on. The honest answer — which is unsatisfying but correct — is that it depends. But the factors it depends on are more specific than most articles acknowledge, and the tradeoffs have shifted meaningfully over the past two years.