Evidence from recent reviews
Names and sectors are used with permission. We avoid vanity metrics; these are qualitative outcomes tied to specific engagements.
They traced our inventory sync failures to a shared library version skew—not the new microservice we were blaming. Short report, brutal prioritisation list.
— Thabo M., CTO, agricultural supply chain
The readout ran long because our architects argued with the findings. That friction was the point; we rewrote two ADRs the same week.
— Sarah P., head of engineering, insurance portal
Wished the dependency audit had included our mobile repo; scope was web-only and we knew that upfront. Still caught three GPL conflicts we had missed.
— Yusuf A., platform lead, media streaming
Refactoring roadmap gave us a “do not touch until Q3” lane for billing—which let us ship a partner API without pretending the monolith was gone.
— Chloé B., staff engineer, B2B marketplace
Case: splitting read models without stopping feature work
A Durban logistics client ran a single PostgreSQL database behind three customer-facing apps. Incidents clustered around reporting queries locking checkout tables. Vector Orbit spent ten days in repo and Grafana, interviewed six engineers, and delivered a review plus roadmap.
Outcome: Phase 1 moved heavy reports to a replica with an explicit lag SLA; phase 2 extracted pricing rules behind an internal API. No big-bang freeze. The client’s measure of success was zero checkout incidents during peak freight week—achieved two releases later.
Constraint we respected: Team of twelve, no hiring window until the next fiscal year.
Case: architecture review before an acquisition diligence
A Cape Town SaaS vendor needed a neutral architecture summary for a buyer’s technical committee. We produced a boundary diagram grounded in actual deploy units, listed integration debt, and flagged one subsystem running on an unsupported runtime.
The buyer used our annex in their conditions; the seller fixed the runtime issue before close. Our engagement was two weeks, fixed fee, no implementation follow-on.