Fractional CTO
Defined technology leadership for a defined period, without filling a permanent role.
Explore fractional CTO work
Audit, Re-Architecture & Optimization
Since 2022, Blobb reviews software systems that have outgrown the architecture they were built on, then plans and executes the work to fix them. Independent, commercially flexible, with no commission on the solutions we design.
The problem
Seeing the cracks?
Most systems that need re-architecting are not broken. They run. They serve customers. They were built correctly for a business that has since changed shape.
What changes is the cost of every next thing. Releases take longer than they used to. The infrastructure bill grows faster than the traffic. A change in one place breaks something in another. New engineers take months to become useful. None of it is an outage, so none of it ever becomes urgent.
Blobb is engaged when a business decides to look at the whole thing at once, rather than one symptom at a time.
The approach
Start with the right level of review.
Blobb usually recommends assessing the system before prescribing a project: prioritizing properly the actions with the highest return on investment make the best use of your money. That can mean a full audit or a focused review of a specific question. The results in our case studies came from establishing that independent baseline first.
- Assess. Review the whole system or one defined concern. A full audit normally runs three to five weeks and closes with a findings register, costed options, and a ninety-day action list. A focused review can be smaller and answer a specific question.
- Decide. Some findings are configuration changes a team can make the same week. Some are structural and need a funded project. The review separates them and estimates the work, so the decision belongs to the business.
- Act. Blobb can plan and lead the re-architecture, execute a narrower optimization, or hand the plan to your team and step back. All three are normal outcomes. The review is not a qualifying call for a larger sale.
Most work is billed hourly against an agreed volume, starting at $230/h. A fixed commitment is also available when you prefer budget certainty; its price is based on the time the work is estimated to require.
Evidence
Measured outcomes
- $3M/year infrastructure savings
- The customer platform was costing roughly $28 million per year in infrastructure when Blobb audited it. Blobb then designed the re-architecture that generated these recurring annual savings.
- 85% less network traffic
- Reduction in data sent to the mobile client of a consumer application, measured against its pre-engagement baseline.
- 20x faster
- Latency improvement on the highest-volume API paths of that same application, each change measured against the baseline before the next was started.
- More than 5M app downloads
- A public transport app architected and launched by a Blobb founder in a prior role. Its wider platform served 500,000 daily active users and 100 million requests per month.
Background
Where this experience comes from
Systems our founders built and ran, before Blobb
Amazon. Amazon Web Services. Airbus. Xerox. Roles held include Chief Technology Officer, Chief Software Architect, General Manager, Director of DevOps and Architecture, Senior Solutions Architect and Project Manager. Experience spans digital and physical products and production chains, from professional print workflows and train-station information devices to telecom devices, IoT, and cloud platforms serving hundreds of millions of requests per month.
Organizations Blobb has been engaged by
Visualping. ScaleGrid. HotTakes. RetargetsLinks. A geolocation compliance provider serving regulated markets. A consumer mobile platform in regulated e-gaming. Full client names list is shared under NDA.
The founders spent ten years and more inside large organizations before running technology at startups. That is the combination Blobb is built on. Mid-size businesses do not need a startup playbook applied to them. They need someone who has worked inside a budget cycle, a procurement process, and a change control board, and who can still read the code.
References
What clients say
Blobb transformed our monolithic product into a scalable platform. Response times fell 60%, releases went from monthly to several times a day, and reliability improved by an order of magnitude.
Blobb brought clarity to complex technical decisions. Leading the re-architecture of our core platform and initiated our Kubernetes offering, taking it from design through to training the team. That practical, end-to-end approach was key to the success of our project.
Working with Blobb, we shipped a world-class app and a flawless launch, with real architectural gains including event-stream abstraction, Pub/Sub messaging, and security controls, backed by senior technical leadership from day one.
Services
Work that starts from the system you have
Architecture
A documented target state and a sequenced path to it, built for real load and cost.
Explore architecture workCloud and on-premise
Independent commercial and technical analysis across cloud, hybrid, and owned infrastructure.
Explore infrastructure workPerformance optimization
Measured changes to systems that have become slow or expensive under real conditions.
Explore performance workTechnical due diligence
An independent technical read for an investor, acquirer, board, or executive team.
Explore technical due diligenceLegacy and technical debt
A remediation sequence based on business impact, without betting the company on a rewrite.
Explore legacy system modernizationIndustries
Experience inside specific constraints
Blobb has delivered inside these sectors, at the level of the technology stack and the constraints that come with it.
Case studies
What a focused review can change
Infrastructure audit for a compliance platform
A recurring annual infrastructure saving of roughly ten times the audit fee, banked from decisions made inside three weeks.
Read the infrastructure audit case studyMobile platform audit before launch
85% less network traffic and 20 times lower latency on the highest-volume API paths, against the pre-engagement baseline.
Read the mobile platform case studyVisualping: from monolith to microservices
A fourfold reduction in AWS spend and fivefold increase in development speed after an 18-month re-architecture.
Read the Visualping re-architecture case studyFit
Who this is for
A good fit
A mid-size business running a system that matters to its revenue, with an engineering team already in place, facing a cost, speed, or scale problem that has been building for more than a year. Budget authority for a specialist engagement. Remote-first working is normal.
Not a fit
Handing over the bulk of implementation or refactoring work. Blobb is most effective as architect, advisor, reviewer, and principal engineer on the critical parts, while your team carries out the larger body of work with our direction. We can also help hire and manage that team. Staff augmentation by the head. Anyone who needs a supplier to agree with a conclusion already reached.
Blobb works remotely, with on-site periods where the engagement needs them.
About
Two disciplines. One engagement.
Blobb is a consulting corporation based in Comox, British Columbia depuis 2022.
The work combines technology and architecture with the process required to make change land inside a real organization.
Meet the founders and learn about BlobbFAQ
Before the first conversation
Do you work remotely?
Yes. Blobb is remote first and adds on-site periods where they materially improve the result.
What is the minimum engagement?
Hourly engagements start with $5,000 of agreed volume. This can cover a focused review of a specific question; a full architecture audit is not required.
Do you implement, or only advise?
Both. Blobb can implement a scoped optimization, lead a re-architecture program or larger engineering organization, or hand the plan over.
In which languages do you work?
English and French, in writing and in meetings.
Contact
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes, no preparation needed. Describe the system and the problem. Blobb will say whether an audit is the right instrument, and what it would cover.