You sign off on it. I tell you what it costs and what breaks.

02 / Decisions

Three things I changed as a CTO.

This is not consulting work for a client: it is what I did and am doing as CTO of Helipagos, a payments fintech. It is where you best see how I decide.

1. 01 Measured

   The checkout that took two days

   The problem

   Handing a new client a custom checkout was manual work. Two business days from the moment they asked to the moment it was running.

   What I decided

   Rebuild it as Checkout v2 and move the customisation inside onboarding, instead of treating it as a separate request somebody had to pick up.

   What changed

   Five minutes, and the client does it alone. In production since December 2025.

2. 02

   Every microservice against the same database

   The problem

   Each microservice connected to one shared database. That couples everything to everything: the schema cannot be touched without coordinating with every team, and isolation between domains exists on the diagram but not in practice.

   What I decided

   Segment by product domain rather than by service. Each domain with its own data, and dependencies written down instead of inherited.

   What changed

   Under way. The slowest of the three, because it is done without stopping the business.

3. 03

   Shipping to production was an unknown act

   The problem

   Deploying was not part of the day, it was an event — and one nobody could fully predict until it was over.

   What I decided

   Build and review pipelines, validation in pair programming, and moving the team to trunk based. Alongside that, raising the quality of how work is written up — without it, a pipeline only tidies up an existing mess.

   What changed

   Going to production became a normal, controlled, everyday process.