my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Nonsense We Put up With: Complexity, Agile Gone Wrong and Enterprise Decision Making

Recently, I've come across a few articles that - although about ostensibly different subjects - share a common theme: When trying to create business value through software and devising the structures required to do so we all too often put up with wasteful processes, politics and toxic behaviour patterns that not only do not contribute to our goal but are downright detrimental. First, there's this transcript of a talk Martin Fowler gave at Agile Australia this year: The State of Agile Software ...

‘Agile’ isn’t a new way of doing software development, it’s the normal way

Recently, during a conversation on software development "methodologies" (just the word "methodology" makes me cringe because it's a needlessly convoluted and complicated notion) one of the participants said something along the lines of "'Agile' isn't for everyone. Most people just aren't cut out for doing software development that way.". I strongly contest that notion. 'Agile' has become some bullshit bingo term that's slung around in order to perpetuate precisely those misconceptions the Agile Manifesto intended to upend. 'Agile' unfortunately is often seen ...

Sunday March 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Daily Standup Meetings: Anti-patterns And What to Do About Them

Daily standup meetings are a mainstay of agile software development methods, such as XP, Kanban (which used to be an inventory control system having originated at Toyota) and Scrum, of course. Given that agile development methods are by far the most dominant ones in the software industry today, it should come as no surprise that daily standup meetings are a common feature of software development processes these days. These meetings basically serve the purpose of informing everyone on the team about these 3 ...

Sunday September 18th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner when a change has been made. This process ...

Sunday January 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications