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AI changes the economics of software organizations and will make teams smaller

Why decision efficiency will matter more than implementation efficiency For the past 50 years, software organizations have optimized for implementation efficiency. That made sense when writing software was expensive. We built specialized roles, functional teams, and structured hand-offs. Product managers wrote requirements, designers created mockups, backend engineers built APIs,

ai Featured

AI adoption is accelerating. Organizations aren't changing with it.

Two years ago, the main question about AI in software engineering was whether large language models could generate useful code. That question already feels outdated. Most large organizations now use AI somewhere in their daily work. Developers use coding assistants, product managers experiment with AI-generated documents, marketing teams create

ai Featured

Software development after coding: Are we thinking too conservatively?

For the past few months, I've been thinking about how AI is changing software development. I don't think the biggest change is that AI can write code. The much bigger question is: Are we massively underestimating how software engineering itself will change over the next 5–

Claude Code: Set up desktop notifications so you never miss an input request

If you use Claude Code on the command line, you probably know this situation: you start a task, switch to another window, or grab a coffee... and 10 minutes later you realize that Claude has been waiting for your input the whole time. That's annoying. In this article,

Spring AI and the free Google Gemini API

When create a new Spring project via start.spring.io, you'll find two dependencies to integrate Google Gemini: Vertex AI Gemini and Vertex AI Embeddings. Both are useful if you use the paid Google Cloud version of Gemini. But if you like to use the free Gemini APIs

Hibernate, PostgreSQL & the @LOB annotation

If you use Hibernate and you need to store large objects with the @LOB annotation, it can get tricky when you need to support PostgreSQL and other databases. In that article, I like to walk you through that trickiness. The @LOB annotation If you like to store larger strings or

Figma exported SVGs with gradients not working as expected

If you are googling that issue that SVGs gradients are not working, and you exported these SVGs from Figma: here is your solution. SVGs are basically XML data. And a gradient is just an XML tag within your SVG file. That gradient YML tag can looks like this: <svg

conference-report

Code Motion 2019 Berlin – conference report

I attended the first day of the Code Motion 2019 conference in Berlin. In this blog post, I like to share the things I learned. There are also two more particular topics I put in individual posts: - The role of an Engineering Manager - Managing remote teams This article sums up

conference-report

The role of an Engineering Manager - CodeMotion 2019 conference report

This post is inspired by a panel discussion from CodeMotion 2019 conference in Berlin. The panel was conducted by Lena Reinhard, Piergiorgio Niero, and Oscar Fanelli. This discussion was about the role of an Engineering Manager. In some companies, the Engineering Manager can also be called team lead for software

agile

Managing remote teams - CodeMotion 2019 conference report

"Becoming a team, one pixel at a time" was a great talk by Lena Reinhard at the CodeMotion 2019 conference in Berlin. She is managing a fully remote team at Circle CI and shared her experience on how to create a successful remote environment. Comparing a company culture

conference-report

BED-Con 2019 - Conference report

BED-Con or Berlin Expert Days Conference is a yearly conference created by the Berlin Java community. The content is usually focused around Java/JVM and some frontend tech. Let me summarize a few of the best talks I have attended. Are we worshiping complexity? A talk by Eberhard Wolff.

agile

Perfect vs 80% MVP

During the product development lifecycle, there is usually one question that comes up: "Should we change the scope, or should we deliver the perfect product/feature?" From an Agile perspective, it makes sense to reduce the scope to a minimum viable product (MVP) launch it and measure how

linux

The state of Linux on a MacBook Pro with Touchbar

Install Linux on your MacBook Pro with Touchbar is a bad idea. The hardware support is not satisfying. Especially not for a desktop system. Here is why...

conference-report

SpringIO 2019 - Conference report

Barcelona, May 2019: The second time in a row, I attended the SpringIO conference to learn the newest and greatest about Spring Framework, and it’s ecosystem around. At this event, you can see engineers behind Spring talking about the latest features of Spring Framework as well as general topics

Innovation in Europe

Last week I attended a podiums discussion about "What is Europe`s role in shaping an AI future?" and learned something about the differences between EU and US CEOs and company leaders. McKinsey analyzed the topics of executive earnings calls and figured out that US companies focus on:

productivity

Getting things done - the art of stressfree productivity

GTD can help to boost your productivity and reduces your stress level. This post shows you how.

Sprint - how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days

This post describes the Sprint process of the book >Sprint how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days< by Jake Knapp. If you are familiar with the SCRUM framework: this sprint is different from the SCRUM sprint. The sprint is a five-day

Story / Epic cutting

Recently I came into a role where I need to act as a Product Owner as part of my Engineering Manager responsibilities. Therefore I put some of my learning efforts on product related topics. One learning out of this experiences I like to share now: it’s about story / epic

Grow with people, grow with projects?

A company grows people wise because they have a lot of things to do and try to achieve all of them. But is it a good idea for an organization to linearly grow a number of projects with a number of people? I don't think so. Be aware

professional-engineering

Getting professional: know your tools

As a software engineer, one of your main responsibilities is building software. This means writing software, hacking code, program or however you name it. To write software you need several essential tools. The first (obvious) is the programming language like Java, Swift, Go, JavaScript, C… The second and often undervalued

How to evaluate the performance of a software engineer

This is the second article about software engineer performance reviews. The first article discussed the overall process of a performance dialogue. This post should now dig into more details about the specific performance measurement of a software developer. Developing software is a complex task where it's hard to

Software engineer performance review

One of the key tasks in leadership positions is speaking to your team members and give feedback. That's the »make people awesome« part of your job as a team lead / engineering manager. Therefore I have regular one-on-one meetings with each of my team members every second

TED

Design on the global scale

This awesome TED talk shows how big companies like Facebook and YouTube are designing new things on their pages. My main take away are: * Design with the users in mind * Data-driven design is working to improve a good design to a great one. A bad design is not going

TED

You don't follow your passion, your passion follows you

Great TED Talk about passion and how the work you do can lead to passion as soon as you improve your skills.

First things first: Purpose

As a leader, you try to develop a strategy for your team. The last days I have struggled a bit with this topic. So here are my thoughts based on severals conversations about it. If you try to develop a strategy you need to have several things clear. One of