The engineering team behind GFoundry
Engineering,
in practice.
We write about what we built, how we built it, and what we learned. Including what went wrong.
Explore the writing-
Latest article
Zero is not the same as nothing
Read the article →: Zero is not the same as nothingA client opened an export from our platform and found a column of zeros. The real numbers existed – the system just went to an empty table and wrote down what it…
More writing
All articles →-
Managing HR from Your LLM of Choice – GFoundry’s MCP in Practice
GFoundry shipped an MCP server. The interesting part is not the technology – MCP is straightforward enough. The interesting part is what becomes possible when your HR platform sits in the same…
-
The platform isn’t dying. It’s changing who it talks to.
Some people argue the era of the software platform is over, and that we’ll soon do everything inside one large language model. I think that’s half right. The work doesn’t disappear. It…
-
ServiceNow Published 64 Pages on People Intelligence. One Line Buried Inside Changes Everything.
ServiceNow just published a 64-page playbook on people intelligence. One buried statistic – only 24% of organisations have formal data cleaning processes – says more than the rest of the document combined.
Different products.
The same curiosity.
The decisions behind the code are more interesting than the code itself.
Our storyFinding the next song.
A music social network, a recommendation engine, and the challenge of understanding what each listener wanted to hear.
Read the engineering story →Learning from behaviour.
Stream mining infrastructure built in an R&D partnership with Fraunhofer Portugal, and the work that followed.
Read the project retrospective →Understanding people at work.
A multi-tenant SaaS platform, years of decisions, and the lessons that only arrive after something has been running for a while.
Read the architecture retrospective →From the archive
Browse the archive →Ten years of multi-tenant SaaS: the decisions we made, and the ones we’d unmake
GFoundry. What held for ten years, what didn’t, and what a small team learns when decisions made in year two still cost you in year eight.
How we built a music recommendation engine in 2007 – before Spotify existed in Portugal
Palco Principal. 70,000 tracks, three engineers, no library worth using. The algorithm, the A/B test numbers, and how the 2008 financial crisis ended it.