What is AI integration in software architecture?

AI integration in software architecture involves designing systems that can seamlessly incorporate artificial intelligence components like RAG pipelines, machine learning models, and intelligent automation. This requires modular architecture, clean data flows, and scalable infrastructure.

How long does a software architecture project take?

Software architecture projects typically take 2-12 weeks depending on complexity. Simple systems can be architected in 2-4 weeks, while enterprise-scale AI-integrated systems may require 8-12 weeks for complete design and implementation planning.

Do you offer free consultations?

Yes, we offer free initial consultations to assess your project requirements and determine if our expertise aligns with your needs. Contact us to schedule your consultation with our senior architect André.

What makes Polyxmedia different from other consultants?

Unlike theoretical consultants, we have real production experience with billion-event systems. André has 20+ years of enterprise-scale development experience and has built systems handling billions of transactions. We focus on practical solutions that work.

Can we meet in person?

Yes, we can organize meetings as required in a mutual location in London or Guildford. If you need me to travel I need notice but get in touch and we can accommodate. We tend to find most things can be done over Google Meet saving everyone time and money which is what we're all after. We believe in being lean and whilst no issue with meeting, we encourage remote first approach because it's the most cost effective for serious operators.

How much does a Fractional CTO cost?

Polyxmedia offers Fractional CTO services at £185/hour or monthly packages: Strategic Advisory at £1,850/month (~10 hours), Growth Partner at £7,400/month (~40 hours), or Platform Leadership at £14,800/month (~80 hours). No long-term contracts required.

What is RAG and how does it work?

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) combines a retrieval system with a language model. Your documents are converted to embeddings stored in a vector database. When users ask questions, relevant documents are retrieved and provided as context to the LLM, enabling accurate answers based on your specific data.

Why do 80% of AI projects fail?

Most AI projects fail due to: unclear business objectives, poor data quality, treating AI as magic rather than engineering, lack of production expertise, and unrealistic expectations. Success requires clear use cases, quality data, and engineers who have shipped AI to production before.

Credits & Acknowledgements

Thank you.

Nothing on this site was built in isolation. Every framework, every library, every shader technique, every person who gave honest feedback, this page is for all of them.

Polyxmedia runs on the shoulders of thousands of open source maintainers who do the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping the web usable. Most of them will never know I exist, and they do it anyway. That is the kind of generosity that makes this industry worth being part of.

This page is my attempt at giving credit where credit is due, the projects this site actually uses, the authors behind them, and the people whose input shaped the work. If you built one of these and I missed you, get in touch and I will fix it.

Frameworks & Runtime

The foundations everything sits on.

Vue.js

Evan You and the Vue core team

The reactive framework powering every page on this site.

Vite

Evan You and contributors

Build tool, dev server, and the reason development here feels fast.

Node.js

OpenJS Foundation

Runs the backend API and the build pipeline.

Vue Router

Eduardo San Martin Morote

Client-side routing.

Vue I18n

Kazuya Kawaguchi

Multi-language support.

Vite SSG

Anthony Fu

Static site generation for the marketing pages.

@unhead/vue

Harlan Wilton and the Unhead team

Document head management and SEO meta.

Design, Motion & Visuals

Everything visual on the site leans on these.

Tailwind CSS

Adam Wathan and the Tailwind Labs team

The styling system for the entire site. Utility classes all the way down.

PostCSS

Andrey Sitnik and contributors

CSS processing pipeline underneath Tailwind.

Autoprefixer

Andrey Sitnik

Vendor prefix handling so older browsers do not break.

Three.js

Mr.doob (Ricardo Cabello) and contributors

Powers the aurora borealis hero, wave grids, and every WebGL effect.

Heroicons

Tailwind Labs (Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan)

Icons across the site.

@vueuse/motion

Yaël Guilloux

The scroll-triggered animations.

@vueuse/core

Anthony Fu and the VueUse team

Composable utilities used everywhere.

Swiper

Vladimir Kharlampidi

Sliders and carousels.

ECharts

Apache Software Foundation

Charts and data visualisations.

Vue Flow

Burak Cakmakoglu

The node editor powering the Workflow Builder demo.

html2canvas

Niklas von Hertzen

DOM to image rendering for exports.

Space Grotesk

Florian Karsten

The primary display typeface.

Google Fonts

The Google Fonts team

Hosting and serving the web fonts.

Aurora Hero

The aurora shader on the About page specifically.

Aurora Borealis Shader

sabosugi on CodePen

The stunning volumetric aurora raymarching shader behind the About page hero. Huge thanks to sabosugi for sharing this openly. Go check their other work, it is beautiful.

lil-gui

George Michael Brower

Used during development to tune the aurora settings before locking them in.

Shadertoy

Inigo Quilez and Pol Jeremias

The community where so many of the raymarching and noise techniques this site uses were first shared.

3D Models

Models used in the real-time scenes.

Blue whale

misaooo

The whale swimming through the homepage hero. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Thank you for sharing it.

Data, Backend & Infrastructure

Things that keep the lights on.

Express

TJ Holowaychuk and the Express team

The API server.

PostgreSQL

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group

The database.

Sequelize

Sequelize contributors

ORM layer.

Vercel

Guillermo Rauch and the Vercel team

Hosting and deployment for both frontend and API.

Resend

Zeno Rocha and the Resend team

Transactional email.

Stripe

Patrick and John Collison and team

Payments.

Supabase

Paul Copplestone and the Supabase team

Auth and data for certain features.

OpenAI

Models behind the AI demos and chatbot.

Anthropic

Claude powers parts of the AI work too, and Claude Code wrote a lot of this.

Security & Reliability

The layers you do not see until something tries to break them.

Helmet

Evan Hahn and contributors

Secure HTTP headers for the Express API.

bcryptjs

Daniel Wirtz and contributors

Password hashing.

jsonwebtoken

Auth0 and contributors

JWT signing and verification.

validator.js

Chris O'Hara and contributors

String validation and sanitisation.

express-validator

The express-validator team

Request validation middleware.

express-rate-limit

Nathan Friedly

Rate limiting on API routes.

csurf (@dr.pogodin/csurf)

Dr. Sergey Pogodin and prior csurf authors

CSRF protection.

web-vitals

The Google Chrome team

Real user performance metrics.

Content & Utilities

Small libraries that do one thing really well.

marked

Christopher Jeffrey and contributors

Markdown rendering for articles and AI responses.

highlight.js

Ivan Sagalaev and contributors

Code syntax highlighting.

uuid

Robert Kieffer and contributors

Unique identifier generation.

dotenv

Motdotla (Scott Motte) and contributors

Loading environment variables.

Tooling & Dev Experience

Things used to build, test, and ship.

Claude Code

Anthropic

Pair programming companion for large chunks of this codebase.

ESLint

Nicholas C. Zakas and the ESLint team

Linting.

Playwright

The Microsoft Playwright team

End to end testing.

Puppeteer

The Chrome DevTools team

Headless browser automation.

esbuild

Evan Wallace

The ludicrously fast bundler Vite uses under the hood.

Terser

Mihai Bazon and contributors

JavaScript minification.

Critters

Jason Miller and the GoogleChromeLabs team

Critical CSS inlining.

imagemin

Sindre Sorhus and contributors

Image optimisation pipeline.

vite-plugin-compression

vbenjs and contributors

Brotli and gzip output at build time.

The Web Itself

The platform and knowledge base everything is built on.

Mozilla and MDN Web Docs

Mozilla and contributors

The documentation that actually taught most of us how the web works.

Chromium

The Chromium Project

The browser engine powering so much of modern web development and testing.

WebKit

Apple and contributors

Safari and the browser we all remember to test in.

Firefox and SpiderMonkey

Mozilla

For keeping an independent browser engine alive.

GitHub

GitHub and Microsoft

Source hosting and the place this whole ecosystem lives.

Stack Overflow

Every single person who answered a question

Twenty years of free help that shaped every engineer on earth.

People

Friends, clients, and collaborators who shaped the work.

Mitch Sullivan

Founder, mitchs.ai

For trust, real feedback, and being the kind of client you actually want to build for.

Everyone who filed a bug report

The internet at large

If you took the time to tell me something was broken, thank you, seriously.

If you maintain open source, if you file bug reports, if you answer Stack Overflow questions at 2am for strangers, the web works because of you. Thank you.

André Figueira, Polyxmedia