Production down. Integration broken. Performance tanking. When your team has tried everything and nothing works, we're the next call. We specialize in the complex, the unusual, and the "we've tried everything" problems.
Every failed project has a story. We've heard hundreds of them. The patterns are remarkably consistent.
A project starts with optimism. The team is capable. The technology choices are reasonable. The timeline is aggressive but achievable. Then reality sets in. Requirements shift. Edge cases multiply. Integration points don't behave as documented. Technical debt accumulates as deadlines loom. Eventually, something breaks-and nobody knows exactly why.
What separates recoverable situations from catastrophic ones isn't luck. It's having someone who can look at a broken system with fresh eyes, diagnose the root cause, and execute a fix without creating three new problems.
Teams deep in a codebase often can't see the forest for the trees. They've built mental models around assumptions that may no longer hold. An outside expert, free from those assumptions, frequently spots issues in hours that the original team couldn't find in weeks.
The Integration Nightmare
Two systems that should talk to each other... don't. Or they did, until an API update broke everything. The vendor says it's your code. Your team says it's the vendor. Meanwhile, data isn't flowing and the business is bleeding.
The Mystery Performance Degradation
The system worked fine six months ago. Now it's slow. Nobody changed anything (they think). The database seems fine (mostly). The servers aren't overloaded (usually). But users are complaining, and nobody can pinpoint the cause.
The Intermittent Bug
It happens in production, but never in staging. It affects some users, but not others. Sometimes. The logs show nothing useful. The error reports are vague. But the bug is real, and it's costing you customers.
The Architectural Dead End
The codebase has grown to the point where every change breaks something else. Adding features takes 10x longer than it should. The team is afraid to touch core systems. The code isn't "wrong," but it's reached a complexity threshold that makes progress nearly impossible.
The Migration Gone Wrong
You moved to a new platform, new framework, new database. Most things work. But the 20% that doesn't is causing 80% of your problems. Rolling back isn't feasible. Moving forward seems impossible.
We've developed a systematic approach to technical rescue through years of pulling projects out of crisis. Here's how we work:
Before we commit to a full engagement, we need to understand what we're dealing with. In an initial assessment session, we:
This assessment is typically free or low-cost. Our goal is to determine whether we can help and what it would take-not to bill hours for exploration that doesn't lead anywhere.
Once we've agreed to proceed, we dig in. This is where experience matters most-knowing where to look, what questions to ask, and how to interpret what we find.
We don't guess. We prove. A fix based on an incorrect diagnosis creates new problems and erodes trust.
With root cause confirmed, we implement the fix:
A fix that only we understand is a fix that will break again. We document:
The bugs that matter most are the ones in production-affecting real users, costing real money. We specialize in:
Modern systems are networks of interconnected services. When those connections fail:
Slow is the new down. When systems can't keep up with demand:
Sometimes the problem isn't a bug-it's the architecture. We help with:
The Problem: An e-commerce platform was losing approximately 15% of checkout attempts. Users would click "Pay," the button would spin, and then... nothing. No error message. No confirmation. The payment sometimes went through, sometimes didn't.
What We Found: A race condition in the payment processing flow. When load was high, two processes could simultaneously update the order status, creating an inconsistent state that caused the checkout to hang indefinitely.
The Fix: Implemented proper transaction isolation and idempotency keys. Added monitoring to detect similar issues before they affect users.
Result: Checkout completion rate improved 18%. Revenue recovered within the first week exceeded the cost of the engagement.
The Problem: A marketing agency's lead pipeline wasn't flowing. Forms were submitted, but leads weren't appearing in the CRM. Sometimes they'd appear hours later. Sometimes never.
What We Found: The integration relied on webhooks from the form provider. Those webhooks had a 30-second timeout. The CRM's API was occasionally slow enough to exceed that timeout, causing the webhook to be marked as failed and retried. But the retry logic had a bug that dropped leads entirely after the third attempt.
The Fix: Implemented an intermediate queue (Cloudflare Queue) to decouple form submission from CRM sync. Webhooks now acknowledge immediately, and a worker processes leads asynchronously with robust retry logic.
Result: Zero dropped leads since implementation. Processing latency reduced from variable minutes to consistent seconds.
The Problem: A business intelligence dashboard had become unusably slow. What once loaded in 2 seconds now took 45+ seconds. The team had tried "optimizing" queries without improvement.
What We Found: The dashboard was executing 47 separate database queries per page load. Over time, as data grew, several of these queries had shifted from index scans to full table scans. But the real killer was that many queries were running sequentially when they could run in parallel.
The Fix: Rewrote the data layer to batch and parallelize queries. Added appropriate indexes. Implemented query result caching for data that doesn't change frequently.
Result: Load time reduced from 45 seconds to 1.8 seconds. Server costs actually decreased because queries completed faster.
The Problem: A 10-year-old PHP application worked fine most of the time, but crashed during traffic spikes. The team had increased server resources multiple times, but the problem persisted.
What We Found: Memory leaks in a custom caching layer that was meant to improve performance. Ironically, the "optimization" was the cause of the crashes. Additionally, session storage on local filesystem created lock contention under load.
The Fix: Replaced the leaky custom cache with Redis. Moved session storage to Redis as well. Implemented connection pooling for database connections that were being opened and never properly closed.
Result: Application now handles 5x previous peak traffic without performance degradation. Memory usage is stable regardless of load.
Not every problem requires outside help. Some issues, your team should handle internally-it's how they grow and learn. But there are situations where bringing in external expertise is clearly the right call:
Sometimes the best approach is pair-solving: we work alongside your team, diagnosing and fixing together. You get the problem solved AND knowledge transferred. Your team levels up while the issue gets resolved.
Reach out with a description of the problem. Include:
We'll respond quickly-usually within hours for urgent issues. If we can help, we'll schedule an assessment call to dig deeper.
The initial assessment is typically 1-2 hours. We'll need access to:
After assessment, we'll provide a diagnosis (or our best hypothesis if more investigation is needed), a proposed approach, and a clear scope and price for the fix.
For critical production issues, we can often start same-day. We maintain capacity specifically for rescue engagements because we understand that technical problems don't wait for convenient timing.
It happens rarely, but we're honest about our success rate. If we determine a problem is outside our expertise or not cost-effective to solve, we'll tell you early and recommend alternative approaches. We don't charge for time spent determining we can't help.
For rescue work, we typically charge by the engagement rather than hourly. After initial diagnosis, we scope the fix and provide a fixed price. This protects you from open-ended billing while ensuring we can take the time needed to solve the problem properly.
We have deep expertise in JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, Rust, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare, and AWS/GCP. For technologies outside our core expertise, we'll be upfront about our limitations. Sometimes we can still help through systematic debugging approaches; sometimes we'll recommend specialists.
We handle sensitive production systems and proprietary code regularly. We sign NDAs as a matter of course and treat all client information as strictly confidential. We never share details about one client with another.
Yes-we also offer architecture reviews, code audits, and technical advisory services. Proactive assessment often catches issues before they become crises. If you're nervous about a system but don't have a specific problem yet, a health check engagement can provide peace of mind or early warning.
Tell us what's happening. We'll figure out if we can help.
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