What We Check Before We Ever Touch Code
The most important engineering decisions on any project happen before the first line of code is written.
Every new project comes to us with an idea of what it needs. A platform, a rebuild, an integration, a migration. Almost none of them come with an accurate idea of what it actually needs, because that only becomes visible once you start asking the boring questions nobody wanted to answer first.
So before we write anything, we spend time figuring out what already exists. Not the pitch deck version, the real version: the databases nobody documented, the third-party APIs with undisclosed rate limits, the "temporary" script from 2019 that three other systems now depend on. Most technical debt isn't created by bad developers. It's inherited silently by people who never got to ask what they were inheriting.
We also check who actually owns the decisions. Not who's in the kickoff meeting, but who can say yes to a scope change without a two-week detour through committee. Projects don't stall because the code is hard. They stall because nobody can approve the answer to a question that got asked on a Tuesday and is still unanswered a month later.
Then we look at what the system needs to be true five years from now, not five months from now. A lot of early architecture choices look identical in a demo and diverge wildly at scale. We try to find out now whether we're building something meant to handle ten users or ten million, because building for the wrong number in either direction is expensive.
Finally, we check our own assumptions against the client's, out loud, in writing, before anyone gets emotionally attached to a plan. Misalignment discovered in week one is a conversation. Misalignment discovered in week twelve is a rebuild. Complexity is never really the enemy on these projects. Unexamined complexity is. The work of handling it well starts long before anyone opens an editor.