$1.14 Trillion to Keep the Lights on: Legacy’s Drag on Productivity

$13 Trillion of the US GDP Rides on Mainframes

Mainframe computers are widely deployed, especially amongst older, bigger American companies. They are robust, trusted and reliable. For older companies, they are the cornerstone of the computing infrastructure that they deploy. At the time of adoption, in some cases over half a century ago, they were cutting edge technology.

Can Two AIs Play the TDD Pairing Game?

Creating Process Continuity in Distributed Elixir

Kohort is an opinionated remote meeting platform we built recently and use Daily at Mechanical Orchard. It lets distributed teams have meetings with more structure, transparency, and connection, with an integrated meeting agenda, live transcription, AI-summarization, and much more.

Features And Design: Why Not Both?

Four Risks of Vintage Systems

How to Eat an Elephant?

“There is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time.” Attributed to notables ranging from St. Francis of Assisi (whose elephant-related credentials are a bit suspect, tbh), to Desmond Tutu, the meaning is obvious: any task, no matter how challenging, can be tackled bit by bit.

How to Make Your AI Less Flaky

Is Extreme Collaboration Remotely Possible?

After a COVID-induced kumbaya moment, not all is harmonious between employers and employees at big tech companies. You see it in the headlines: “The CEOs drawing a hard line on return-to-office policies” or “TikTok rankles employees with RTO tracking tools.” Or just visit r/programming.

Making an AI Sandwich

Mechanical Orchard Raises $24M in Series A Round to Solve the Legacy IT Modernization Challenge

Mechanical Orchard: A New Company With a Long History

Mechanical Orchard: Responsible Development

Old School, New Rules: A Milestone

Securely Connect All of Your GCP Cloud SQL Clients in 15 Minutes

The AI Robots are (Not) Coming 
for Our Jobs

You’ve seen the demo videos that start with a prompt describing an application, followed by a stream of LLM generated code. Are we at the holy grail of no code development? And how will that impact our jobs as software builders?

The Seeds of Mechanical Orchard

Mechanical Orchard traces its origins to the beginnings of the agile movement. Those early days saw a rapid evolution in software development techniques and philosophy, concentrated in the Smalltalk community, where Kent Beck took what he’d learned over many years and crystallized it into an approach he called Extreme Programming (XP).

“Friction” >> “Debt”

“Here” Means Longitude