Platform Engineering
Kubernetes, internal developer platforms, observability and reliability practice.
Chapter I
A small practice with long memory.
NOTSOBAD LTD was founded on the idea that software, like any other craft, is better when it is made by people who care about the part nobody will see.
№ 01 — Our Story
How the company came to be.
NOTSOBAD LTD was incorporated in 2020 by a group of engineers who had spent the previous decade inside larger consultancies and product companies. We wanted to keep working together, but on fewer projects, with more care, and with our names attached to the result.
We chose the company name as a quiet correction to the industry's tendency toward superlatives. We are not here to ship "the best" of anything. We are here to make sure that the systems we touch are, demonstrably and durably, not bad — and usually a great deal better than that.
Six years later, the practice is still small, still senior, and still attached by name to every system it builds.
№ 02 — Mission
To make the technology beneath modern work calm and trustworthy.
We build systems that fail gracefully, scale predictably, and respect the people who depend on them.
№ 03 — Vision
Infrastructure as quiet as electricity.
A future where intelligent, secure software is so reliable that the people who use it stop having to think about it at all.
№ 04 — Values
Six principles, written down.
- 01.
Craft
Code is read more often than written. We optimise for the reader.
- 02.
Candour
We document what failed as carefully as what worked.
- 03.
Continuity
We design for the team that comes next, not the one applauding now.
- 04.
Curiosity
We treat unfamiliar problems as the most interesting kind.
- 05.
Care
The people using the software are real. Their time is finite.
- 06.
Consequence
Every system we ship has a maintainer with a name attached.
№ 05 — The Team
Small, senior, distributed.
The practice is a network of engineers, designers and operators with a median of fourteen years in production work. We hire slowly — and only people we would trust with a system we cared about.
- Engineering
- Backend, platform, web, mobile, embedded.
- Design
- Product, interface, design systems.
- Data & AI
- Machine learning, analytics, applied research.
- Security
- Application security, identity, governance.
№ 06 — Expertise
The disciplines we have lived in.
Applied AI
Retrieval-augmented systems, document extraction, ML platform engineering, decision support.
Cloud Architecture
Multi-region designs across AWS, GCP and Azure. Cost engineering as a first-class concern.
Application Security
Threat modelling, identity architecture, secure SDLC, incident readiness.
Data Engineering
Warehouse design, transformation pipelines, governance and lineage.
Product Engineering
Long-lived web and mobile applications with clear ownership and instrumentation.
№ 07 — Achievements
A short list, kept honest.
240+
Production systems shipped since 2020
98%
Engagement renewal rate, year over year
18
Countries from which the team works
6 yrs
Median client tenure on long-running platforms
64%
Median reduction in incident volume post-handover
3–5×
Typical first-year return on cost-engineering work
0
Material security incidents on systems under our care
7 days
Median time from incident close to written review