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When Should a Company Have an Internal Software Dev Team?

The topic for today's (2026-08-11) chat is: When should a company have an internal software development team? Is there an ideal size or other factors that influence that decision? When is internal development better than paying for consultants and/or 3rd party software?

Inspired by me currently discussing this issue with two companies and having this discussion in the past. Would love to have a specific yes/no metric but haven't found one yet. My current answer is "it depends ...". I would love to hear others' thoughts on the subject.

Everyone and anyone is welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

P.S. - The feature image is from Lumo, Proton's AI assistant. It took a couple prompts to get an image that was useable and it really struggled putting any correct text on the image. Thoughts?

Illustration contrasting an internal software team collaborating around a computer with a business person shaking hands with an external consultant

Other Emerging Tech

Are there other emerging technologies in the computer world that you find interesting? Maybe even other implementations of AI outside of the current mainstream? AI, particularly LLMs, is obviously the hot topic of the day, but what about other innovations that are going on?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

What's happening with GitHub.

GitHub had quite a time last month:

April 23 (Merge Queue incident): A regression in the merge queue (especially with squash merges involving multiple PRs) caused incorrect merge commits. It affected 658 repositories and 2,092 pull requests. Changes from earlier merges were inadvertently reverted in some cases. No data loss occurred (commits were still in Git), but default branches ended up in inconsistent states for some repos. GitHub couldn’t auto-fix everything safely.

April 27 (Elasticsearch/search incident): The Elasticsearch cluster (used for search in PRs, issues, projects, etc.) became overloaded—likely from a botnet attack—and stopped returning results. This disrupted UI search features for several hours but didn’t affect core Git operations or APIs.

Others have commented on their recent decline (see chart below). Do you still trust them? Are you sticking with them, or exploring alternatives? Don’t forget... GitHub isn’t Git 😉 .

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

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