When your only technology leader walks out mid-roadmap, you don't have three months to hire. Here's what interim CTO services cover, when they beat a permanent hire, and the day rates to expect.

The hard part isn't deciding whether a fractional CTO helps — it's knowing when you've crossed the line from 'we're managing' to 'we need executive technology leadership.' Here are the signs and inflection points that answer it.

CodeStringers Announces Strategic Evolution to Zoho-Centered Digital Enablement Solutions for Operationally Complex Businesses.

A fractional CTO gives a growing company senior technology leadership part-time — the roadmap, architecture, and hiring judgment of a CTO without the full-time cost. Here's the full picture.

How to structure a software development team: the essential roles, how they work together, generalist vs specialist and cross-functional models, and how big the team should be.

In my first job out of college, I was a cost accountant at a chemical plant. Part of my job was to lead brainstorming meetings on cost savings with the workers. In the back of every meeting, chewing on a toothpick, was a grizzled old Vietnam War veteran named Bob. Bob was universally respected because he had the most seniority of anyone in the plant. But Bob wasn’t too happy about being in a meeting led by a 22-year-old kid. Whenever I, or anyone else, would make a suggestion

Last week, we discussed how we keep our promises, which differentiates us from most of the competition. We mentioned that we offer free “discovery” to our prospective clients, and that one benefit of this offer is the opportunity to evaluate clients before we agree to work with them. Internally, we call this our “No Jerk Policy” (we actually call it the “No A**hole Policy but this is a PG-rated blog, so we’ll censor ourselves). This policy of ours, put in other words, means t

This week’s This American Life episode really got me thinking. It’s a story about a guy named Ken who unknowingly stumbled into the NFT gold rush. Ken was working a regular job at Amazon, and in his spare time, he created a site called Pixelmap. He built it to practice a new programming language. Ken forgot about it until he was contacted by an online influencer named Adam McBride, who informed him that Ken had created one of the first NFT sites in history. Consequently, he w

Hollywood seems to be obsessed lately with famous start-up scammers. Browse through your Netflix, and you’ll see that Billy McFarland, Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, and Anna Delvey have documentaries or TV series about how they defrauded investors out of millions and even billions of dollars. I admit it, I’ve seen them all. At first, I thought it was just a guilty pleasure. But upon reflection, I think these shows teach the wrong lessons and draw the wrong conclusions. In

A fractional CTO gives a small business senior technology leadership for a fraction of a $400K+ full-time hire. Here's what fractional CTO services cost, what they actually do, and how to tell whether your business needs one.

Hire a Zoho developer who can actually code, not just configure. What Deluge/API/Creator skills to look for, how to vet them, in-house vs freelancer vs firm, and what it really costs.

There was a time when building software meant mastering programming languages, navigating complex frameworks, and spending months - or years - crafting every feature from the ground up. Today, that landscape is changing faster than many anticipated. Thanks to the explosive rise of no-code platforms like Webflow, Bubble, and Make, non-technical professionals are building apps, automating workflows, and launching digital products - without ever opening a code editor. The tools

I. IT is More Than Just "The Computer Guys" Have you ever been in a situation where you were up late working on an important project when, all of a sudden, your system crashes on you? Or maybe you have an important presentation and the conference room’s AV system fails? Or worse yet, you’re about to launch a huge new marketing campaign and your website crashes. Who do you call? IT guy to the rescue! The only problem is, not every company has the luxury of having a top-tier I

I remember the first time I saw a developer break the rules in the best way possible. It was during a hackathon at a software company I worked with. While most teams were focused on refining existing features, one group decided to approach the problem from a completely different angle. Instead of optimizing the codebase, they built an entirely new solution using an unconventional technology stack. At first, their idea seemed too risky - why fix what wasn’t broken? But by the

In 2024 we saw new tools emerge and early adopters started to use those tools. In 2025, we are now seeing broad evaluation and likely adoption of tools in virtually every job function in a software company. We’re seeing tools that can improve website text content, write blog posts, and plan SEO configurations. We see tools that can write code. I just sent an email on a new tool that helps design user interfaces (and the Travel product team has just gone through a UI overhaul,

I’ve read lots of business advice books, most of them in my MBA program but I continue to read one or two a year. For the most part, they have the same advice: be assertive, take calculated risks, take control of your own destiny, find your passion, etc., etc. However, there was one book I read over a decade ago that I still think about often – Seth Godin’s “The Dip”. This book has several messages, all of which resonate with me to this day. The first is that in order to succ

In our previous two blog posts, we discussed how we engage with potential new clients and how we ensure on-time delivery. In both posts, I highlighted the involvement of CodeStringers' senior leadership. This hands-on approach sets us apart from countless other software outsourcing companies in terms of the quality and outcomes we deliver for our clients. In this post, we want to clarify all the value that potential clients can expect when senior leadership is actively involv

As a former software company founder I can tell you that a founder’s biggest fear is not being able to get a product launched before you run out of money. When this happens, a founder loses all credibility with investors and, oftentimes, with themselves. Consequently, when we started CodeStringers we wanted to offer a commitment that the competition doesn’t make– a guarantee that we’ll hit your budget and timeline. This ensures that your product sees the light of day and the

Even though we’re an outsourcing company, we also receive multiple solicitations a day from competitors asking if they can help us build software. They try every gimmick in the book to get us to respond– free lunch, free coffee, and lately, they’ve been offering some sort of free work upfront to capture our interest as a prospective client. This puts us in an odd position because we also rely on outbound marketing to bring in new business. So now, how is a prospective client

At CodeStringers, we consider ourselves experts in Agile implementation, and we consider that one of our key competitive advantages. Lately, however, we’ve been noticing that team dynamics are an often-overlooked variable in the success (or failure) of Agile implementations. The most successful and efficient teams, we’ve noticed, consistently exhibit certain key characteristics that significantly impact productivity. In this article, we delve into five essential elements of a