---
okf_version: "0.1"
title: Ben Milleare
description: Pages and notes from Ben Milleare, fractional CTO. Technical leadership, AI systems, and writing on building things that scale.
---

# Pages

- [Ben Milleare - Fractional CTO](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/home.md): Strategic technical leadership for ambitious companies. Ben Milleare is a CTO who architects scalable systems, builds high-performance engineering teams, and ships AI that actually works.
- [About Ben Milleare](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/about.md): CTO and technical leader with twenty-five years of building and fifteen years leading technology teams. Solo-founded, bootstrapped and sold businesses, most recently a DaaS that reached over £600k ARR.
- [Ideal-client profile](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/fit.md): Ben works best with ambitious scale-ups, growth-stage companies, and non-technical SMEs at specific inflection points, where the technical decisions are the ones with the biggest blast radius.
- [Technical co-founder for equity](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/cofounder.md): Experienced CTO available as technical co-founder for equity. Ben builds MVPs and leads the engineering for validated ideas with strong go-to-market plans and real industry expertise behind them. Selective by design.
- [Angel investment for young engineers](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/angel.md): £10-20k seed funding plus hands-on mentorship for ambitious software engineers with low overheads and high hunger. A first business partner, not a passive cheque.
- [Web3 & Crypto Advisory](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/web3.md): Web3 CTO advisory for crypto-native teams. Smart contract architecture, DeFi protocol strategy, MiCA compliance, and the engineers to ship it. In crypto since 2013.
- [The First-Time CTO (the book)](https://benmilleare.com/okf/pages/book.md): A field guide for new technical leaders: practical lessons from twenty-five years of building, scaling, and selling technology companies. Coming soon, with selected chapters serialised on Notes.

# Notes

- [Never double-charge: the UPDATE is the lock](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/never-double-charge.md): Fixed Temporal workflow IDs, an UPDATE that doubles as a lock, and fail-closed reconciliation: layering double-charge protection into a payments system.
- [Does every CTO need a skunkworks?](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/do-you-need-a-skunkworks.md): With agentic teams, two hackers can spin up five MVPs while a normal team ships one feature. The case for keeping a skunkworks in your back pocket.
- [Containment beats permission](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/containment-beats-permission.md): Coding agents should run unsupervised, but inside a dev environment that's safe to be wrong in. The agent boundary is the wrong line to defend.
- [Let the price do the migration](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/let-the-price-do-the-migration.md): Most companies run a migration campaign to clear users off a deprecated API. Anthropic just tripled the price of theirs and let market forces do the work.
- [GitHub got hacked](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/github-breach-rotate-your-secrets.md): GitHub had 3,800 internal repos exfiltrated via a poisoned VS Code extension. If your private repos have ever held a secret, rotate it today.
- [Marketing is the work](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/marketing-is-the-work.md): Brent Roose says PHP's biggest problem is marketing, not the tech. The same is true of almost every business that's quietly good at what it does.
- [Reselling tokens isn't a business](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/reselling-tokens-isnt-a-business.md): OpenAI is reportedly burning $1.69 for every dollar earned, and Anthropic is already raising prices. If your AI business is mostly API markup, the price floor is coming for you.
- [Multi-token prediction, on a small laptop](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/gemma-4-mtp-on-a-small-laptop.md): Google shipped multi-token prediction for Gemma 4. The headline 3x speedup is for big GPUs, but the edge-model drafters quietly target laptops like mine.
- [Vibe coding isn't engineering](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/vibe-coding-isnt-engineering.md): Engineers treat coding agents as smart junior devs. Vibe coders treat them as their CTO. The gap matters more than the AI hype suggests.
- [Welcome to Notes](https://benmilleare.com/okf/notes/welcome-to-notes.md): What this section is for, what to expect, and the loose rules I'm writing it under.