You are hereStage I, the first question
Roy van KaathovenSurvey of a projectSheet 1
How I take a project from the first question to running in production.
Eight stages, drawn as the ground they feel like. Follow the red line. Each stop says what happens, what you get and what I need from you.
Heights show how hard the going usually feels. Nothing on this sheet was measured.
Stage IThe Blank Margin
With the problem. Before anyone says a word about stacks or tools, I want to know who has this problem, what it costs them today, and what changes when it goes away.
Stage IITrig Point
A surveyor fixes a few points they can trust and measures everything else from those. If a system already exists, I read the code and the infrastructure alongside the diagrams, because the design and the implementation usually explain each other. Then I separate what will really bite from what only looks untidy.
Stage IIIBase Camp
The smallest slice that runs end to end, in the real environment. It's small enough to throw away and real enough to learn from. Everything later gets carried up from here.
Stage IVThe Ridge
Up here you can see both valleys. Most decisions are cheap to reverse and a few are not, so those few get the time. I keep designs simple and reversible, and I work on the architecture and the team together because they mirror each other.
Stage VThe Long Climb
I own the design, the architecture and every decision. AI coding agents do much of the implementation in parallel branches against a written plan. That only works if the codebase is built for it: a design document per system, and a test suite and typecheck that every change has to pass.
Stage VIFalse Summits
Usually not yet. Some generated work is confidently, plausibly wrong, which is the worst kind because it looks finished. Turning a pile of raw material into something shippable is the job: selecting, judging, killing the bad stuff, fixing the almost-right stuff.
Stage VIIThe Summit
Getting out the door is the quieter half of the job. You depend on a lot of moving parts you don't control, and each one has to be integrated, tested and signed off before it can go live.
Stage VIIIThe Far Side
Now you live here. A live product has no quiet maintenance window, so I invest early in making problems visible before users have to report them: errors, analytics, health checks, alerting and clear ownership.
This sheet has no time scale. No two projects walk it at the same pace, some stages take an afternoon and some repeat. Tell me where you are and I'll tell you what I'd expect from there.
With sound on in the header, the contours move to Godspeed, a track of mine.
Sheet 1The Blank Margin
You've seen the whole route, and you're back at its start: a question and a lot of blank paper. That's the right place to be. Tell me what the problem is and we'll work out the first mile.