The Red Lotus Journal
Notes from people who
implement and code.
Architecture, code, data and projects we've worked on, with diagrams we draw by hand right here on the page.
Notes from people who
Freshworks Partner, Reseller or Direct: Which Should You Use?
There are three ways to buy Freshworks: direct, through a reseller, or through an implementation partner. The licence costs the same on all three. What changes is who runs the project, who invoices you and who you call after go-live.
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Recovering a website that had no backup
While checking out a venue for an event, I found out the venue's website was down: unpaid hosting and no backup anywhere. What followed involved archive.org, Instagram, an AI and a lot of phone calls explaining what an authenticator app is.
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Test vs Staging vs Production: What Each Environment Is For
Twenty R scripts with the file path baked into the middle of the code. It ran beautifully on my machine, and a full day of Ctrl+F later I understood what configuration was. From The Pragmatic Programmer to Miguel Grinberg's config classes, and why a CRM sandbox only comes with the Enterprise plan.
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Freshdesk Omni Plans and Pricing: Growth vs Pro vs Enterprise
Three columns on the screen and a rep telling you Pro is the most popular. I've set up all three: Growth to leave the multichannel mess, Pro when there's work to automate, Enterprise by size or by risk. With the flaw in each plan, the price jump, what's an AI add-on and how the phone works.
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Ticket routing in a CRM: automating who handles what
A POS stops working at a store 300 km from the capital. Three vendors service a chain of over a thousand stores, each owning part of the equipment in part of the stores, under three distance-based SLAs. How a spreadsheet became a custom object and started routing thousands of tickets a day, with a triage queue for the ones that fit no rule.
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From the Guia 4 Rodas to AI
In 2003 my band crossed São Paulo with a Guia 4 Rodas on my lap and we never made it to the store. From the paper map to Waze, from shipping in the dark to CI/CD, and now AI: what changed in how we get the way wrong.
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Don't Panic: A Data Migrator's Guide to CRMs
The company switched CRMs, the old system goes dark in two weeks, and four years of history need to cross to the other side. Breathe: data migration has a method. The three types of migration, the staging area, the sample test, the load, the cut-off date and the final checks, from someone who has migrated Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce, Movidesk and Zenvia.
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Multichannel vs omnichannel support: ten open tabs are not a strategy
I visited a friend who runs a shop and watched his support run: two people, a wall of open tabs, notifications firing all day. That is multichannel, and it is not omnichannel. The difference, the channels that matter in Brazil, and three technical questions to ask any vendor before you connect a single one.
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Customer Support Portal: The 5 Layers and a QA Checklist
It is the most visible part of the whole CRM project, and the one that gets underestimated the most. It goes into the proposal as a courtesy and ends up the busiest channel in the operation. The five layers that make a support portal deflect tickets, the UX that makes it feel like yours, and a QA checklist to run before you launch.
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Once upon a time, a team with no QA
A late project, a contract that paid for features but not for bug fixes, and a Friday deploy that blew up over the weekend. A one-line bug took an integration down and nearly cost us the contract. The story of building a QA area, and how QA came to pay for itself in the contract.
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When you need a middleware (and when you don't)
A customer opens a ticket to check an order, and your agent needs their purchase history from VTEX, Magento, or Wake. Three ways to wire it: the bad, the good, and the ideal. Here is when a middleware earns its place, with rate limits, error handling, and an Azure hosting lesson.
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Beakman, Ford, and dividing to deliver
A childhood science show, Henry Ford's assembly line, and a habit that still shapes how I ship software: break the work down, deliver a working piece, and validate early instead of planning forever.
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9 tech books that shaped my career
Nine books that marked my path, from naval engineering into software and data: the Pragmatic Programmer, testing, Python, Git, SQL, UX, dashboards, data warehousing, and CSS.
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The naval engineer who became a dev
For decades I said no to programming. Then one real problem, in Manaus, with a spreadsheet that couldn't keep up, finally made it click. A story about the real problem that got me programming.
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Lessons from music that transformed my tech career
From a rock band in the Napster era to leading engineering teams, the instruments changed but the lessons carried over: the danger of over-specializing, versatility as an advantage, and what playing in a band teaches about leading a team.
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