Technical notes from our Pilot Builds.

Reference architectures, technology selection criteria, and rollout roadmaps — written for people who'll actually read the code and run the system, not company news.

Optimization LoopMeasurementOptimisationStatistics

Before running an A/B test, work out one number — for most Vietnamese sites it exceeds a year of traffic

You do not have to run an A/B test to find out whether it can conclude anything. One calculation, about a minute's work, gives the minimum number of visitors required. For a site with 500 visitors a day, detecting a 10% improvement needs 322 days — and the habit of checking results daily pushes the false-win rate from 4% to 20%.

13/09/202611 min read

AI & MLGPT-6CybersecurityAI cost

GPT-6 Astra: skip the AGI claim, these three numbers are the ones that matter

On 3 September OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, and the company's president said it might come to be seen as AGI. For anyone who has to make a decision, that sentence is close to unusable. Three other numbers from the same day are not: a risk rating no model had reached before, a 37-point gap on the same test, and a price 2.5 times higher.

03/09/202611 min read

DevelopmentOpen SourceTypeScriptUI Components

Forge Dialog: dialogs built on the native <dialog> element, with no z-index left to hunt

An admin page needs to ask "are you sure you want to delete this?". The browser's built-in confirm can do it, but it freezes the whole page and cannot be styled; the usual replacements drag in a framework. Forge Dialog is how we solved that for our own products: no runtime dependencies, built on the native dialog element, with React, Vue and Svelte adapters inside the same package.

02/09/20269 min read

Server & DatabaseSubmarine cablesRedundancyOperations

Another cable break: check your own routing in 10 minutes, and know when buying more actually helps

On 25 August, three of Vietnam's six submarine cables were down at once. This article is not about redundancy theory — it gives you four commands you can run right now to find out where your traffic goes and whether it is congested, how to tell where your servers sit from a single number, and the real prices of each backup option so you know which one is worth buying.

28/08/202614 min read

IoT & SensorsIoTCalibrationMonitoring

Sensors rarely fail outright — they drift, and drift triggers no alarm

The devices are still online, the data still arrives on schedule, the charts still look smooth, and nothing has alerted for months. The only problem is that the numbers stopped being correct a while ago. This is the failure mode that slips past every routine check — and one very concrete example shows why: a CO₂ sensor's self-calibration assumes the room empties out once a week.

25/08/202611 min read

Optimization LoopCloudInfrastructure costOptimisation

When cloud prices stop falling: 'ship now, optimise later' just expired

On 4 January 2026, AWS quietly raised H200 GPU prices by 15% — ending two decades in which compute prices moved in one direction only. That does more than make the bill larger. It breaks the unspoken assumption that has bailed out every wasteful architecture for fifteen years: ship it, prices will fall.

15/08/202613 min read

Data AnalyticsDashboardsData AnalyticsDigital transformation

The dashboard was delivered and nobody opens it: the tool is not the problem

A company pays for a reporting screen, the handover goes well, and three months later nobody opens it. The first instinct is to blame the software, or to blame staff for not being comfortable with numbers. One figure shows both explanations miss: inside the same company, executives use it around 80% while employees use it around 26% — same software, same data, same screen.

14/08/202611 min read

Server & DatabaseDisaster RecoveryRansomwareRTO/RPO

A backup is what you have restored, not what you have stored

Most organisations knocked over by ransomware had backups. The failure sits in two places nobody measures: backup repositories are targeted in 96% of attacks, and when the attacker sits quietly inside for months before encrypting, the most recent copy — the thing every backup design optimises for — is the infected one.

08/08/202613 min read

IoT & SensorsICS/SCADAAICritical Infrastructure

Attacking the power grid with AI: what changed is not the way in, but who can afford the trip

2025 produced two events that look contradictory: a cyber-espionage campaign in which AI handled 80–90% of the hands-on intrusion work, and a dam whose valve control was taken over for four hours because of one weak password. The gap between them is what is actually changing for physical infrastructure.

03/08/202613 min read

Data AnalyticsPersonal Data ProtectionComplianceData Architecture

Vietnam's Personal Data Protection Law: the legal text takes an afternoon, the engineering takes months

Law 91/2025/QH15 took effect on 1 January 2026 alongside Decree 356/2025/NĐ-CP. Reading both takes an afternoon, but the real obligations reduce to three architectural questions — and most operating businesses cannot answer the first one: what personal data are you holding, and where?

01/08/202612 min read

AI & MLAI AgentMCPProduction

AI agents for the enterprise: reliability multiplies, it doesn't add

Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled before the end of 2027. The cause usually isn't model quality: a 20-step agent that is 95% reliable per step completes the whole run only 35.8% of the time — and that's arithmetic to do before committing budget, not after.

28/07/202610 min read

DevelopmentAccessibilityWCAGCompliance

Accessibility for business websites: why 83.9% of home pages still fail the easiest criterion

The WebAIM Million 2026 report found low-contrast text on 83.9% of home pages — the single easiest WCAG criterion to check by machine — and the six most common failures haven't changed in seven years. This isn't a knowledge problem. It's a measurement problem.

27/07/20269 min read