Show, don't
tell.
Each section below answers a question buyers ask before they book a call: the engagements, the artifacts, the fit, the person, the operational record.
Same hands, same pattern.
Shipped before Hardcut, same hands. Anonymized prior-role engagements, names changed, shapes intact. The first Hardcut-branded cut will appear here the week it lands.
- 01 MigrationPrior role
Unsticking a stalled enterprise platform migration
A migration of about 4,000 microservices had stalled for two to three years with fewer than 10 done, a vendor-support deadline closing in, and a platform team that had lost developer trust.
Retail 2022 - 02 MigrationPrior role
Live character-set migration on a production database
A market expansion required moving the production database to UTF-8 on a live system serving real customers, where a botched conversion means corrupted or lost data.
Marketplace 2021 - 03 MigrationPrior role
Founding SRE for a payments-adjacent platform
Real money and donor data ran through a platform that had never had a dedicated operations or security owner; developers ran all the infrastructure themselves.
Payments-adjacent 2018 – 2019
What you get.
Three artifacts leave every engagement on the table. Samples below are pulled from a prior-role cut, anonymized and published in full, names changed, structure intact. No black-boxed methodology.
- S01Statement of work
- R00Cutover runbook
- R09Dry-run schedule
Who this is for, who it isn't.
Hardcut runs eight to twelve engagements a year, owned end-to-end by one specialist. The qualifier saves a call, yours and mine.
- A legacy estate you have been putting off: on-prem, colo, Heroku, an older cloud account
- A team of 10 to 500 that wants one named price for the whole thing
- IaC as a deliverable, not a slide
- Body-shop staffing: 20 engineers on-site Monday
- Parallel-forever migrations
- Sovereignty-regulated Canadian government work
One specialist, no body shop.
Hardcut is run solo by Marthinus Meyer from Toronto. The person on the first call is the person who reads the infrastructure, writes the Terraform, runs the dry runs, and pushes the DNS change at 02:00 on cutover night.
- AWS
- Ten-plus years · production architecture
- Ansible
- Since 2014 · pre-Red Hat acquisition
- Terraform
- Since 2018 · production from 0.11 onward
- Compliance
- PIPEDA · Quebec Law 25 · PCI DSS · PHIPA
Public under fire.
The state of security in this industry doesn't trend up. Quiet failure does. Hardcut publishes every incident inside one business day of close, severity-ranked, with the runbook step that caught it. Security is the lead pillar of the Well-Architected review on every discovery, not an upcharge.
- Severity scale
- P1–P4 public · mapped to response-time commitments
- Disclosure window
- Every incident posted inside one business day of close
- Security pillar
- Well-Architected Security pillar leads every discovery
- Regions
- us-east-1 / us-west-2 · ca-central-1 / ca-west-1 for residency
If you're staring at a migration you've been putting off, let's talk.
Thirty-minute call by default. No deck, no sales engineer, no follow-up sequence. Either there's a Hardcut-shaped engagement here or there isn't, and you'll know which one by the end of the call.