Benedict Roeser Posts

As startups evolve, their product changes frequently. Instead of focusing on the best possible product though, they should focus on awesome teams. A truly agile, passionate and intelligent IT team can quickly adapt to changed objectives and create different products over time. Through this lens, the software that is created can be considered as a mere byproduct of a well-functioning team. A team that has fun working and builds high-quality software on the side. Here’s how.

Software developers sink a tremendous amount of time into boilerplate code. Code that does not bring any business value and is just there to “make things work”. Over the years, in some areas our community managed to reduce boilerplate code significantly. Projects like Spring Data Rest for instance remove the hassle of writing boilerplate code to access data from a database and map it to entity objects. It even removes the need to write controller code. But is that enough? This article implores more radical steps to avoid or remove boilerplate code.

For every problem, there is a multitude of solutions. Helping clients to find the ideal solution for their issues, is what a consultant does. In this article, I’ll tell the tale of a very German printing problem, that may or may not have really happened. I’ll present three possible solutions, one of them I consider worthy of the ‘perfect consultant’.

Printing…? Like most IT professionals I have a love-hate-relationship regarding printers. These machines seem expensive, loud, slow and often unnecessary, on the other hand, finding a solution to the arcane art of printing (article in German), is always fascinating.

While working on an IT project, thousands of decisions are made. One of the most important tools to handle the project, are decision logs. Most articles praising the benefits of decision logs focus on how they help to make, remember or fine-tune a decision. The biggest value I see however is, that decision logs can prevent repeating costly mistakes. Consider them as a safety net as powerful as 100% automated test coverage. In order for that to work though, you need to write proper decision logs. I’ll tell you how.

There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.

Georg W. Bush

It seems to be a generally acknowledged truth (often bolstered by Reverse Conway’s Law) that decisions regarding the software systems you build should take your team size into consideration. That often leads to the belief that there is a fitting system architecture for small, medium-sized and big teams. That’s wrong.