https://leegold.com/tags/fractional-cto/ Recent content in Fractional CTO on Lee Goldsworthy Hugo en-au Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://leegold.com/posts/before-you-start-your-mvp/ Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/before-you-start-your-mvp/ The Dream Link to heading You’ve worked in the field for 10 or 20 years, you’ve lived the problem first-hand, you’ve got this idea for a product. You know you won’t be a millionaire overnight, but your early revenues from the product will guide what features you build next. You just need to find “someone who knows tech”, and you’re ready to start building… …is a fantasy we tell ourselves as founders. https://leegold.com/posts/non-tech-leaders-champion-security/ Mon, 27 May 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/non-tech-leaders-champion-security/ Park your car in a bad suburb, leave your laptop on the passenger seat, leave your keys in the ignition. What happens next? The above is akin to what I often see in tech-enabled early-stage companies with respect to their security and privacy practices: Dangerous sh*t that’s going to result in loss and sadness if some changes to skills and awareness aren’t made. Here’s a real-world example of what I consider to be some of the best “everyday security culture” being put into practice by a non-tech leader at one of my clients: https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Shovel cash into the furnace that is AWS/Azure. It’s fine. For a while at least. Don’t do cost optimisation Link to heading I encourage early stage tech companies to not even think about their AWS/Azure bill until it reaches $10k/y. At that point, it wants a timeboxed 1 hour sanity check, with perhaps a few hours of tightening up unused services, then don’t look again until it reaches $20k. https://leegold.com/posts/real-full-stack-developer/ Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/real-full-stack-developer/ Have you ever met a REAL “full stack developer”? I have. Once. Just recently. During job interviews for a client, one walked in and (to my surprise), had no distinguishing visual features (no unicorn wings or horn, not even a faint glow). We explored the usual interview topics, but it only took one sentence for them to convince me they were the real deal. It was weird the preternatural calmness with which they shared how their current employer would sometimes ask them to head out to the warehouse and stack pallets when there were no others with a valid forklift license currently on shift.