Welcome to the Nextworld Tech Blog

It’s been ten years since I sat down with Kylee McVaney and her father Ed, each of us throwing half-baked ideas to each other from across a coffee table. At that point, all we had was the question that had been nagging each of us for years: What if we didn’t have to carry forward all the architectural compromises we’d spent decades working around?

We’d been building enterprise software long enough to know where the bodies were buried. ERPs. CRMs. And so many spreadsheets. We’d watched companies pour millions into customizations, only to face the same painful choice every few years: rip it all out and start over, or keep layering patches on top of patches until the whole thing becomes brittle and unmaintainable.

As our coffee-chats became whiteboard sessions, we realized we had a chance at a fresh start. And when you get a blank sheet of paper—which is rare—you don’t forget your history. You learn from the sins of the past. You build differently.

That’s what Nextworld became. A metadata-driven, stateless, cloud-native platform where customizations roll forward with every upgrade. No reimplementation. No “upgrade projects” that are really just expensive rebuilds in disguise.

But this post isn’t about selling you on Nextworld. If you want that, head to nextw.com.

This post is about why we’re starting a technical blog, and what you can actually expect from it.

Who This Blog Is For

If you’ve ever argued about the right level of abstraction for a business rule engine, this blog is for you.

If you’ve inherited a system where “temporary workaround” turned into “load-bearing technical debt,” this blog is for you.

If you’re skeptical of platforms that promise no-code simplicity but can’t tell you what happens when you hit a real edge case—yeah, this blog is for you.

We’re writing for software engineers, platform developers, solutions architects, and technical leads who build and maintain enterprise systems. People who’ve been burned by magic black boxes. People who want to understand how something works before they trust it with critical data.

We assume you’re technically fluent. We’re not going to explain what an API is or why statelessness matters in a distributed system. We’re going to get into the weeds, where the interesting decisions live.

What You Can Expect

Here's the thing about building an enterprise-grade platform: the hardest problems are rarely the ones you see in product demos.

The hard problems are: How do you design an abstraction layer that's powerful enough for complex business logic but simple enough that someone without a CS degree can use it? What happens when your metadata-driven architecture meets a customer's 15-year-old ERP that wasn't designed to talk to anything? What does it actually take to embed AI into workflows people rely on?

Those are the kinds of questions we want to dig into here. Not because we have all the answers, but because we've spent years working through them.

Over the coming months, expect posts on:

· Platform engineering: Architecture decisions, extensibility tradeoffs, and what "upgrade-safe" really means when you're dealing with thousands of customer customizations. We're eager to talk about how our metadata layer really works.

· Developer experience: Where no-code holds up, where it doesn't, and the hard choices between flexibility and simplicity.

· Integrations: Most of our customers aren't starting from scratch—they're wrapping new capabilities around legacy systems. We'll share patterns that work and a few cautionary tales.

· AI in practice: Not trend pieces, but practical discussions about embedding AI agents into real workflows, and how to balance guardrails with innovation.

· Build stories and postmortems: The wins, the refactors, and the assumptions that turned out to be wrong.

Will some of this reflect well on Nextworld? I hope so. We're proud of what we've built, but our goal isn't to pitch you. If you walk away with an idea you can apply to your own work, that's a win, whether you ever touch our platform or not.

Why now?

Well, because I think we've learned things worth sharing.

When we started Nextworld, metadata-driven architecture was a bet. Stateless servers were a bet. Building a platform that could handle complex enterprise workflows without requiring custom code? That was definitely a bet.

A decade later, those bets have paid off. But not without lessons along the way. And those lessons are valuable to those in the development community that still want to build things.

The engineers on our team have built systems across ERP, financials, manufacturing, and more. They embraced AI early but with skepticism and rigorous stress-testing. They've dealt with legacy constraints that would make your eyes water. They have unique perspectives on development in a new age that I myself am eager to hear articulated.

This blog is where we’ll share that knowledge, because honest discussions about tradeoffs lead to better systems. For everyone.

If you're building enterprise software, evaluating platforms, or just curious about how we think about these problems, stick around. We'll try to make it worth your time.

And if something we write sparks a question or a counterargument, we'd love to hear it. The best solutions come from people willing to argue through the hard problems together. Our current partners and customers can find us over at the Nextworld User Community. And for everyone else, we're not hard to track down.