From the hive
Notes from
live systems.
More from the archive: page 2 of 5. Real automation wins, integration scenarios, and lessons from building and running software.
Ten signs your business needs workflow automation
If work lives in Slack, Gmail, HubSpot and Sheets, manual handoffs will break. Here are ten signs, the automation pattern to fix each, and what to measure first.
MTD for Income Tax: automate bookkeeping before the 2027 threshold
MTD for Income Tax quarterly updates depend on clean bank feeds and categories. Set up rules, receipt capture, and a quarterly workflow now, before the £30k threshold hits in April 2027.
Zapier vs Make vs n8n: which automation tool fits your business?
A practical decision framework for Zapier, Make and n8n: skills, volume, data residency and the hidden costs that show up when you scale.
UPS shipping automation: labels, tracking and returns without copy paste
How to generate UPS labels from orders, push tracking to customers, and handle returns, using UPS APIs with n8n or a shipping platform.
Connect Airtable to ChatGPT: 5 ways, costs, and when not to
A practical guide to connecting Airtable to ChatGPT using Airtable AI, ChatGPT’s Airtable connector, n8n, Make, Zapier or a custom API, with privacy and cost trade offs.
Inside Barb: finding the holes before someone else does
Barb is the studio’s security node: a repeatable penetration-testing methodology that breaks into our own software under authorisation, reads the source and attacks the running app at once, and hands back CVSS-scored findings with concrete fixes, every one verified by a human, not a scanner.
Inside Waggle: getting found across search and AI answers
Search has split into blue links and AI answers, and a monthly SEO PDF can't keep pace with either. Waggle folds five data streams into one signal and works the whole site every week, publishing, fixing and closing citation gaps across Google and every answer engine, adapting the same day the data moves.
Moving the Colour Index from v2 to v3, without losing a record
The Colour Index, the global reference for dye and pigment data, has moved to v3: edge-first and API-first. We migrated 45,720 products, 11,771 colour fingerprints and ~11,800 users off an ageing monolith, repairing the data as it crossed, with no resets and no lost logins.
Reporting, rendered: how Scout and SwarmGen build our reports
Scout knows who visited your site and why; SwarmGen turns an HTML template into a pixel-perfect PDF. Pointed at each other, they produce our visitor-intelligence reports (branded, scheduled and client-ready) with each tool doing the one thing it's good at.