Four systems, and the trade-offs they cost.

A sales performance dashboard recomputed everything on demand against a legacy system I was not allowed to touch, query directly, or ask for a push feed. Here is what I could change, and what it cost.

One integration platform configured per client at runtime, instead of a fork per customer in code — and no engineering work required from the client to onboard.

A delivery pipeline where a planner model scopes the ticket, cheaper models implement it, and the planner reviews the diff against its own plan — with a human gate where it belongs.

Substring search over personal data without reversible encryption — field-scoped, key-rotatable, and built so that a leaked index yields hashes rather than names.