Grounded in references
Community idioms, recognized expert opinions, books and articles we can cite. Not personal preference dressed up as fact.
Sometimes the most useful thing is a clear-eyed perspective from outside the team. You've inherited a system you didn't write. Leadership is weighing a rewrite, a refactor, or a “leave it alone.” Something feels off and nobody on the team can quite name it. A Tech Review is a focused, time-boxed engagement that produces a real written report on the state of your codebase: not a slide deck, not a verbal readout, but a document your team can read, argue with, and act on after we're gone.
What's in the report
Length and depth vary with scope. We typically open with a system overview, including how an outside engineering team reads your application and the broader architecture where access allows. From there we move into static analysis, with our take on what the best tools in your ecosystem flag and what's noise, and dependencies, looking at what you're pulling in, how current it is, where the risk lives, and where you're carrying things you don't need.
The manual code review is usually the longest section. We look at idiomatic use of the language and framework, code organization and coupling, the parts hardest to understand, and the technical debt we can name and describe. We review representative slices in depth and generalize from there to the rest of the codebase.
The test suite, developer ergonomics, and performance and security observations round out the body of the report. Depending on access and the questions you most want answered, we may also weigh in on database modeling, infrastructure-as-code, or the production system itself. Final thoughts close with a summary of strengths, weaknesses, and what we'd prioritize.
How we approach the work
A Tech Review typically runs two to three weeks. We start by aligning on the questions you most want answered: the rewrite-or-refactor decision, the scaling concern, the new-CTO orientation, the pre-investment sanity check. The scope is finite, so we agree on what's in and what's out up front.
We dig into representative slices of the code in depth, then generalize. We lean on whatever tooling your ecosystem already has in place and bring in our own where it helps, including AI to surface patterns and insights faster across a large codebase. None of it replaces human judgment, and that's what the report rests on. We work alongside your team, not over their shoulder. The goal isn't to catch anyone out, but to surface what an outside engineer with no skin in the game would see, and write it down in a way that's useful to the people who do.
Where we run these
We run Tech Reviews in the technologies we know deeply: Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, Rust, and the modern JavaScript/TypeScript stack we work in day-to-day. The value of an outside read depends on the reviewer being genuinely expert in the language and framework, so we don't take on reviews of stacks we don't know well.
If your codebase is somewhere we can't add real value, we'll tell you up front rather than learn on your dime.
Where we're fluent
- Rails
- Phoenix
- Rust
- TypeScript / JS
How we write these reports
Honest about judgment
When we're speaking from experience or taste, we say so explicitly and frame it as one possibility among others.
Alternatives over verdicts
When we'd do something differently, we describe what we'd do and why, and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Clients that asked us to do a tech review
Argos
WyeWorks came in to revamp Argos' educational platform, improving the Elixir & LiveView codebase and adding SSO and payments.
ElixirFrontend Development
Flavorpill
WyeWorks helped Flavorpill achieve an 18-fold increase in concurrent users and sharply reduce response times.
Backend DevelopmentProcess Consulting
Let's Build Together.
Ready for a clear-eyed read on your codebase that you and your team can actually act on?
Sometimes the most useful thing is a clear-eyed perspective from outside the team. You've inherited a system you didn't write. Leadership is weighing a rewrite, a refactor, or a “leave it alone.” Something feels off and nobody on the team can quite name it. A Tech Review is a focused, time-boxed engagement that produces a real written report on the state of your codebase: not a slide deck, not a verbal readout, but a document your team can read, argue with, and act on after we're gone.
What's in the report
Length and depth vary with scope. We typically open with a system overview, including how an outside engineering team reads your application and the broader architecture where access allows. From there we move into static analysis, with our take on what the best tools in your ecosystem flag and what's noise, and dependencies, looking at what you're pulling in, how current it is, where the risk lives, and where you're carrying things you don't need.
The manual code review is usually the longest section. We look at idiomatic use of the language and framework, code organization and coupling, the parts hardest to understand, and the technical debt we can name and describe. We review representative slices in depth and generalize from there to the rest of the codebase.
The test suite, developer ergonomics, and performance and security observations round out the body of the report. Depending on access and the questions you most want answered, we may also weigh in on database modeling, infrastructure-as-code, or the production system itself. Final thoughts close with a summary of strengths, weaknesses, and what we'd prioritize.
How we approach the work
A Tech Review typically runs two to three weeks. We start by aligning on the questions you most want answered: the rewrite-or-refactor decision, the scaling concern, the new-CTO orientation, the pre-investment sanity check. The scope is finite, so we agree on what's in and what's out up front.
We dig into representative slices of the code in depth, then generalize. We lean on whatever tooling your ecosystem already has in place and bring in our own where it helps, including AI to surface patterns and insights faster across a large codebase. None of it replaces human judgment, and that's what the report rests on. We work alongside your team, not over their shoulder. The goal isn't to catch anyone out, but to surface what an outside engineer with no skin in the game would see, and write it down in a way that's useful to the people who do.
Where we run these
We run Tech Reviews in the technologies we know deeply: Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, Rust, and the modern JavaScript/TypeScript stack we work in day-to-day. The value of an outside read depends on the reviewer being genuinely expert in the language and framework, so we don't take on reviews of stacks we don't know well.
If your codebase is somewhere we can't add real value, we'll tell you up front rather than learn on your dime.
Where we're fluent
- Rails
- Phoenix
- Rust
- TypeScript / JS
How we write these reports
Grounded in references
Community idioms, recognized expert opinions, books and articles we can cite. Not personal preference dressed up as fact.
Honest about judgment
When we're speaking from experience or taste, we say so explicitly and frame it as one possibility among others.
Alternatives over verdicts
When we'd do something differently, we describe what we'd do and why, and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Clients that asked us to do a tech review
Argos
WyeWorks came in to revamp Argos' educational platform, improving the Elixir & LiveView codebase and adding SSO and payments.
ElixirFrontend Development
Let's Build Together.
Ready for a clear-eyed read on your codebase that you and your team can actually act on?