Ankush Shandilya is a fractional CTO and long-term technology partner, and a co-founder of Behind Methods. He has 15+ years building, scaling, and modernizing software for founder-led SaaS and e-commerce companies in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. His clients stay for years. He has been the fractional CTO behind PerkZilla, a US referral-marketing SaaS, since its 2016 launch, and has run a 15-year engineering partnership with Viktoria Professional Movers in Toronto. Earlier work includes Zen Flowchart, which grew past 1.6 million users, and CoinDiscovery, a crypto platform that scaled to 9 million users. He is among the top 3.5% vetted talent on Uplers. He takes on a maximum of two long-term clients at a time, so each one gets one accountable partner, not a rotating agency team.
Expert Opinion Jul 21, 2026
The ticket said use SVG. The real fix was one line somewhere else.A one-line ticket asked me to switch thumbnails from PNG to SVG for better quality. Following it would have opened a stored XSS hole to fix a problem SVG does not even cause. The real cause was resolution, and the fix was one option. Here is how I checked the guess, and why I then did not build the better architecture I had already designed.
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Software Development Jul 14, 2026
What does it cost to modernize a legacy PHP application?Modernizing a legacy PHP app costs less than a rewrite and carries far less risk, because you keep the product earning while you fix it. Here is what actually drives the cost.
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Legacy Modernization Jul 14, 2026
Two Errors, One Insert: The Deadlock That Was Not a DuplicateTwo error signatures sat on the same line of code, a duplicate-key error and a deadlock. They looked like one problem and were not. Here is how to tell them apart and the two small fixes, no schema change.
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Coding & Programming Jul 10, 2026
How to optimize Redux state for performanceRedux does not get slow on its own. It gets slow when the store holds too much, components re-render on data they do not use, and selectors recompute. Here is how I fix each one.
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Expert Opinion Jul 09, 2026
Writing code got cheap. Verifying it did not.AI made writing code cheap this year. It did not make verifying code cheap. The bottleneck moved one step downstream, to the part nobody automated: deciding whether the code is correct, safe, and worth keeping.
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Software Development Jul 03, 2026
I Shipped a Feature to Production and Nobody Could See It. On Purpose.I made a new UI the default for one account and left everyone else on the old one, from the same deploy. The difference was one database row. Here is how I built the smallest feature-flag system that has the right shape, and the design calls behind it.
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Software Development Jun 30, 2026
How to modernize a legacy PHP application without a full rewriteA rewrite is the riskiest way to fix a legacy PHP app, and usually the slowest. Here is how I modernize a codebase that makes money, in place, without a rewrite and without taking it down.
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Expert Opinion Jun 26, 2026
The team didn’t shrink. It changed shape.A principal engineer told me one to three seniors with AI can replace a team of juniors. He was right, and he stopped one step short. AI scales execution. It does not scale judgment.
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Software Development Jun 18, 2026
The Bug That Was Never One Bug: A Missing Toolbar That Hid Three ProblemsA campaign-builder bug looked like a one-line fix. It was three problems stacked under one symptom. Here is how I found the two the error console never showed.
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AI Engineering Mar 12, 2026
Agentic AI in PHP Is Not a Prototype Idea. It Is a Production Architecture DecisionAgentic AI systems in PHP are not a novelty. They are a structured architecture problem… and PHP solves it cleanly when you treat the AI layer as a domain concern, not a script. Neuron AI provides the primitives: agents, tools, memory, and providers. The missing piece most PHP teams skip is governance… clean interfaces, reusable tool registries, and stateless […]
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