Software Development
From Compliance Mandate to Proprietary Platform: Afianza’s Approach to Verifactu
Few decisions define an advisory firm’s positioning as much as how it responds to a regulatory change. Verifactu, the requirement to digitize invoicing for hundreds of thousands of Spanish SMEs, has confronted every advisory firm with the same choice: refer clients to third-party software or build a response of their own. The first option is […]
AI frontend testing: a complete workflow, not just code generation
AI already writes a meaningful share of the frontend code that goes through my hands. That has moved the bottleneck: the hard part is no longer producing code, it’s producing code with the confidence that what you ship today still works tomorrow. AI frontend testing has stopped being something that happens after the fact and […]
Cryptography in Node.js: hashing, encryption and trust from scratch
Two researchers, a hostile network, and no guarantee the message arrives unread or untampered. This is the perfect starting point to understand cryptography in Node.js: not as mathematical black magic, but as a set of pragmatic tools you already use every day without knowing it. At Orbitant, we wanted to go deeper into cryptography, so […]
npm Security 2026: Secure Publishing with Granular Tokens, Worms, and Trusted Publishing
This article is based on a talk I gave at Orbitant about secure npm publishing, expanded with additional context and the changes that have landed since then. For those who don’t know me: I maintain and contribute to hundreds of open source packages —including some in the npm top 100—, I’m a Node.js Core Collaborator […]
Eight Teams, One LLM, and Real Data: Our First Prompting Kata
Code katas are well-known in the development world: practical exercises that help you improve specific skills in a controlled context. But prompting katas are relatively unexplored territory. Search for “code kata” and you’ll find millions of results, entire repositories dedicated to the topic, specialized platforms. Search for “prompting kata” on Google and you’ll find little […]
Apogee: How We Built Our Open Source Slack Bot for Karma
Building your own tool when you spot a need is incredibly satisfying. Unlike day-to-day client work, there are usually no ambiguous requirements, no endless meetings, no never-ending debates about button colors. It’s just you facing a concrete problem, with your code editor and the stack you know how to solve it. That’s how Apogee was […]
a11yConf Girona 2025: A First-Hand Account
Truly designing with people in mind means that when someone needs help in an auditorium, they don’t have to stand up, search for a volunteer, or interrupt a talk. It means they can bring their phone close to an NFC tag on their chair, discreetly request assistance, and receive help in less than a minute. […]
The Economics Behind Refactoring
Passionate software engineers will fight for code quality and propose refactors from time to time in order to improve the overall codebase and reduce technical debt. The purpose of this article is to challenge that idea by introducing a new variable: the economics behind these actions. Are they needed? To what extent? Are they really […]
Use Your Legacy to Retire Itself
At Orbitant, we’ve faced the challenge of migrating our customers away from their legacy platforms many times. On every single project we’ve completed, we seemed to end up using the same key ally: the very same legacy system we were trying to replace. This approach might seem counterintuitive at first – why maintain something you’re […]
What Custom Software Development Is — and How It Drives Business Efficiency
Choosing a new tech provider is no minor decision. It can unlock growth — or hold back a company’s digital evolution for years. Mid-market businesses know this all too well. After years of wrestling with off-the-shelf solutions, many now face a critical question: should they keep adjusting to tools that never quite fit, or take […]