@mdostal
Technical leadership, architecture decisions, and scaling engineering teams — from the trenches
- Fractional CTO engagements (Series A / bootstrapped SaaS) - Technical advisory for founders ($4,500+/mo) - Architecture audits & technical due diligence - Strategic sprints: fundraising prep, PE diligence, platform reviews I especially enjoy short-term deep-dive audits with larger organizations — second opinions on architecture, vendor evaluations, and honest technical assessments.
1d ago · 12 min read · Hertz was a $9.8 billion company running on a 30-year-old technology platform. The CEO said that publicly. Underneath it: 1,800 IT systems, six database vendors, 30 rental processing systems, and a core built on IBM AS/400 mainframes running COBOL. A...
Join discussion1d ago · 12 min read · The work I do now as a fractional CTO isn't new. But it's different from consulting in ways that matter. I spent years at EY and Zilker Technology leading technical engagements — architecture direction, team building, platform migrations. Those were ...
Join discussionMar 20 · 18 min read · Follow-up to **The Week I Stopped Coding A month ago, I wrote about the moment I stopped coding and started orchestrating AI agents. That post was about the shift — the emotional and philosophical pivot from developer to director. This post is about...
Join discussionMar 6 · 12 min read · Most DevOps problems aren't DevOps problems. They're people problems — someone got excited about Kubernetes before they had a second service, or someone hand-configured a production server and left on vacation. I've watched teams spend weeks building...
Join discussionMar 6 · 15 min read · What Does a CTO Actually Do? I’ve made the Postgres versus MongoDB call more times than I can count. At Firefly Events, we chose MongoDB deliberately for its timeseries data capabilities, native geo-sharding, and the eventual consistency model we’d s...
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