Articles

Field notes on cloud platforms, data engineering, and running engineering teams — written from the scars, not the slides.

Blueprint illustration of a fact being written into an encrypted vault, then tested after a time gap with a reworded query and scored pass or fail

MEMORY SYSTEMS · FEATURED

Why most AI memory benchmarks measure the wrong thing

Storage size and retrieval latency are easy to benchmark. Whether the right fact comes back when you actually need it is the number that matters, and almost nobody tests for it.

Matthew Firth · Sep 10, 2026

Blueprint illustration of a commit graph inspected by a magnifying glass leading to a shield and audit checkmark, with a faint unaudited shadow laptop in the background

GOVERNANCE

The shadow AI risk nobody is auditing: your own commits

Shadow AI usually means an unsanctioned chatbot. The sharper exposure for most engineering orgs is AI-generated code that never passes through the audit trail a compliance program assumes.

Matthew Firth · Oct 3, 2026

Blueprint illustration of a swipe interface branching into either a repeating engagement loop or a handshake and calendar representing an arranged meeting

PRODUCT

Most "AI matchmaking" is a dating app with a chatbot bolted on

If an app still rewards time in app over meetings arranged, calling it AI matchmaking is marketing, not a different mechanism. A three-question test for telling the two apart.

Matthew Firth · Sep 24, 2026

Blueprint illustration of a tall server-rack tower shrinking to half its height in a matching, neatly stacked tower

COST ENGINEERING

How we cut our cloud bill in half without cutting capability

No heroics, no migration to bare metal — just a methodical audit of what we were actually paying for, and the discipline to act on it.

Matthew Firth · Jul 12, 2026

Blueprint illustration of a founder at a drafting table, dashed lines fanning out to gears, a networked heart, documents, and a rocket

FOUNDING

Building NexSpark solo: what AI actually changes about being a founder

Two products, one matching engine, no employees. What held up, what didn't, and where AI earns its keep.

Matthew Firth · Jun 28, 2026

Blueprint illustration of a field of sensor devices with dashed signal lines converging into a large database cylinder

DATA PLATFORMS

What 14TB of IoT telemetry taught me about boring technology

We run one of the least fashionable stacks you could pick — and it's exactly why the platform works.

Matthew Firth · Jun 5, 2026

Blueprint illustration of a cracked monolithic block disassembling into an orderly grid of small cubes

MODERNIZATION

Escaping the monolith without a big-bang rewrite

Nine years modernizing a platform Fortune 500 clients depended on daily — while it stayed in production the whole time.

Matthew Firth · May 14, 2026