<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>Grupa VII — Scent &amp; Signal</title><description>Engineering consultancy specializing in fintech, banking, payments, and travel. We track down the problems other consultants gave up on.</description><link>https://grupavii.eu/</link><language>en-us</language><item><title>Deep Tracks: Mapping India Outside the Heap</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/deep-tracks-mapping-india-outside-the-heap/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/deep-tracks-mapping-india-outside-the-heap/</guid><description>When your dataset is 33 billion grid squares and your deployment constraint is one machine, the JVM&apos;s garbage collector becomes your enemy. How memory-mapped files turned an impossible memory problem into a solved one.</description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>JVM</category><category>Performance</category><category>Memory Management</category><category>Deep Tracks</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item><item><title>The Overgrown Trail</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/the-overgrown-trail/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/the-overgrown-trail/</guid><description>A healthcare financial system&apos;s batch processing took an hour. After the rewrite, it took 45 seconds. But the 80x speedup wasn&apos;t the real win was removing the production risks that had accumulated over years of neglect.</description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>Legacy</category><category>Performance</category><category>Healthcare</category><category>From the Field</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item><item><title>Picking Up the Scent</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/picking-up-the-scent/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/picking-up-the-scent/</guid><description>A CTO asked for an honest assessment of their stack before a board presentation. What I found in two days changed how she talked about engineering to her board, and probably saved the company from a painful surprise during their next fundraise.</description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>Due Diligence</category><category>Architecture</category><category>Strategy</category><category>From the Field</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item><item><title>The Stampede</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/the-stampede/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/the-stampede/</guid><description>The program had forty engineers and was shipping slower than when it had five. A story about the paradox of scaling engineering teams, and why the fix was organizational, not technical.</description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>Scaling</category><category>Teams</category><category>Growth</category><category>From the Field</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item><item><title>Old Growth, New Trails</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/old-growth-new-trails/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/old-growth-new-trails/</guid><description>Building foundations for a mainframe migration that processes a million transactions per minute. How golden paths, quality standards, and the right frameworks let you scale beyond your own team.</description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>Mainframe</category><category>Migration</category><category>Architecture</category><category>From the Field</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item><item><title>The Trail That Went Cold</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/the-trail-that-went-cold/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/the-trail-that-went-cold/</guid><description>When peer-to-peer RSocket communication suddenly stops working, the logs show nothing. The docs say everything should work. Sometimes the only trail left is the source code itself.</description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>RSocket</category><category>Debugging</category><category>Microservices</category><category>On the Trail</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item><item><title>Lost in a Forest You Built</title><link>https://grupavii.eu/blog/lost-in-a-forest-you-built/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://grupavii.eu/blog/lost-in-a-forest-you-built/</guid><description>The architecture that worked at 10,000 users won&apos;t work at 100,000. Here are the warning signs that you&apos;re approaching a ceiling.</description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate><category>Architecture</category><category>Scaling</category><category>Growth</category><author>contact@grupavii.eu (Szymon Kaczorowski)</author></item></channel></rss>