Author
Sava Markovic
Founder, DanubioSince 2018
Sava founded Danubio in 2018 to be the kind of engineering partner he always wanted on the other end of a critical project: senior, direct, trusted with meaningful product work. He keeps the company focused on strong technical judgment, close client relationships, and software that needs to be done well.
Outside the company, he's a private pilot. The discipline overlaps with engineering more than you'd think: checklists, weather calls, and trusting the people who taught you.
The relationship is the work. Code outlives a contract, and the people who wrote it should still be reachable years later.
Real work, named owners.
Posts by Sava.
How we rebuilt a backend without migrating the data
The riskiest rebuilds change code and data at once. We kept one shared data layer, got read parity for free, and deferred schema changes until after cutover.
How to evaluate an engineering partner’s real cost
Developers lose 42% of their time to rework, and that is just one hidden cost a rate card never shows. How to read an engineering partner’s real cost.
Do you actually need Kafka?
More than 80% of the Fortune 100 run Kafka, so teams reach for it by default. We run it at 20,000 events a second, and we also turn it down. How we decide.
How we took dashCMA from a founder’s vision to acquisition
A founder had the market and the vision for dashCMA. We were the engineering team. Concept to acquisition by Inside Real Estate in 18 months.
What AI changes about how we build software
Three in four engineers will use AI coding tools by 2028. They write code faster, and the judgment that makes it good still has to come from people.
How we shipped HomeSearch AI in five months
Inside Real Estate committed publicly to launching AI-powered search in five months. The models existed; the platform did not. We built it and hit the date.
When your AI-built prototype has to scale
AI writes most of the code in a quarter of new startups. That proves the product; the architecture still has to be built. Rebuilding an AI-built MVP for scale.
What eight years on one codebase taught us about M&A
We built dashCMA, watched Inside Real Estate acquire it, and stayed on as the engineering team. Eight years on, the same team runs it for 350,000+ agents.
How we rebuilt a live multi-tenant SaaS without downtime
We took ownership of a live real estate platform and rebuilt the backend under it, moving tenants one at a time with no downtime. It now runs 5,000+ tenants.
Outsourcing Software Development to Serbia
How Serbia became a strong choice for senior software engineering: deep talent, direct communication, US-overlapping hours, and rates below US onshore.