Blog & Articles

Blog Post

Was ist ein Data Contract?

Ein Data Contract definiert die Struktur, das Format, die Semantik, die Qualität und die Nutzungsbedingungen für den Datenaustausch zwischen einem Datenanbieter und seinen Konsumenten. Es ist damit ein zentrales Werkzeug, damit sich Teams über Daten-Schnittstellen verständigen können und somit Stabilität, Datenqualität und Nachvollziehbarkeit in der Datenarchitektur gewährleisten.

Blog Post

AI Tools in Business Environments

Currently, the importance of AI tools is growing at a breathtaking pace and has also gained importance in the general public. More and more companies and organizations are relying on the advantages of artificial intelligence to improve their processes, increase their productivity, or better serve their customers. AI tools are able to reliably analyze data, recognize patterns, and make predictions that can already surpass human abilities in some areas. This makes them a valuable tool for optimizing business processes and developing innovative products and services. It’s no wonder that the demand for AI tools has exponentially increased in recent years and will continue to grow.

Article

Build an internal development platform
Blog Post

Retrospektiven - Teil 4

Diese Blogpost-Serie fasst meine Erfahrung als Facilitator mit mehreren Remote-Teams in Software-Projekten über eineinhalb Jahre zusammen. Ich stelle Ihnen meine Grundsätze und alle Formate vor, die ich bislang entwickelt habe.

Blog Post

Evolving software like an orchardist

Software systems are usually larger, overgrown structures that developers need to bring back into shape after some time. However, creating an overview of the sprawling conglomerate of software components is challenging, let alone developing a clear plan for moving on. This blog post uses analogies from pruning apple trees to show developers how to evolve their software systems using a value-based approach.

Blog Post

Drawers for Product Owners

One role, different meanings

Blog Post

Retrospektiven - Teil 3

Diese Blogpost-Serie fasst meine Erfahrung als Facilitator mit mehreren Remote-Teams in Software-Projekten über eineinhalb Jahre zusammen. Ich stelle Ihnen meine Grundsätze und alle Formate vor, die ich bislang entwickelt habe.

Blog Post

Retrospektiven - Teil 2

Diese Blogpost-Serie fasst meine Erfahrung als Facilitator mit mehreren Remote-Teams in Software-Projekten über eineinhalb Jahre zusammen. Ich stelle Ihnen meine Grundsätze und alle Formate vor, die ich bislang entwickelt habe.

Blog Post

Retrospektiven - Teil 1

Was macht eine gute Retrospektive aus?

Blog Post

Running an AI Chatbot on Your Own PC

Llama.cpp, gpt4all and others make it very easy to try out large language models. Here’s a short guide to trying them out under Linux or macOS.

Blog Post

Why Your Team Needs Data Products

Have you ever had the feeling that you or your team spends too much time on individual data research tasks or makes too many decisions based on your gut? Then it might be time for your team to start engaging with data products.

Blog Post

Draw The Diff
Article

Babylon as a Feature

The Tower of Babylon is a myth meant to explain why the world’s peoples speak different languages. In modern IT systems, it’s often a requirement to support multiple languages. Such internationalization (i18n for short) is a tough challenge – and this post describes a simple solution to just the tiny part of multilingual documents. Our solution combines the simplicity of the plain-text format AsciiDoc with a simple yet versatile build script to support multiple languages (like EN and DE) and multiple output formats (like PDF and HTML).

Article

Assessing the Sustainability Impact of Startups

As a startup, caring about sustainability should be a priority for several reasons. Firstly, a sustainable product can differentiate your business from competitors and attract environmentally conscious customers and investors. There are various international standards that you can look into when assessing your business’s sustainability, but there is also a European one.

Article

An Introduction to TLA+ and Its Use in Parties

You’ll get your pizza eventually

Article

Property-based Testing with “fast-check”

It isn’t exactly news that developers have to write not only code but also tests. Nevertheless, many find this to be burdensome and monotonous work. Plus, it is far from guaranteed that unit tests actually cover all the border and non-border cases. A modern approach is property-based testing, which consists of specifying an abstract condition that is then automatically checked by the test framework.

Blog Post

How to Encrypt a File on the JVM

You’ve got a secret password and some bytes you’d like to encrypt. JVM has all the tools you need to get it done.

Article

Creating data products with Terraform on AWS
Article

Tracing in verteilten Anwendungen

Nicht nur, aber auch durch die DevOps-Bewegung machen sich Teams heute neben der Fachlichkeit vermehrt Gedanken um den Betrieb ihrer Anwendungen. Ein großes Thema ist hierbei Observability, also einen Einblick in den aktuellen Zustand des Systems zu haben. In dieser Kolumne betrachten wir mit Tracing einen der drei Bereiche von Observability und lernen anhand eines konkreten Beispiels, wie wir diesen umsetzen können.

Blog Post

Automated code maintenance with OpenRewrite (Part 2)

In part 1 of this series, I showed how OpenRewrite can be used to automate code maintenance tasks for software development projects in your organisation. In this post, I will demonstrate how to write your own OpenRewrite refactoring recipe. This will not only help you to perform refactoring tasks for which no recipe is publicly available, but will also deepen your knowledge and understanding of how OpenRewrite works under the hood.

Article

Modules – Microservices – Monoliths

Back to the architectural guidelines

Blog Post

Automated code maintenance with OpenRewrite (Part 1)

With the large number of software development projects in most organisations, keeping these projects up to date with the latest security patches and framework updates can be quite a task. OpenRewrite is a library that provides an automated solution to this problem. Using recipes written in Java, it can perform large-scale source code refactoring during the build process, preserving as much of the original code as possible. In this blog post, I will explain how OpenRewrite works and how you can use it to refactor your code base.

Blog Post

Kustomize Enhancement with KRM Functions

For a while, Kustomize has offered the possibility to extend its functionality with plugins that can be implemented in different ways. A new way is to use KRM functions that are not proprietary and can also work with other tools.

Article

Round-robin coding

Code handover in mere seconds with the mob tool

Blog Post

How to use Apple Shortcuts to integrate GPT-4o in macOS and iOS

Apple Shortcuts is a powerful app that lets you create custom workflows with multiple steps using your apps and content. You can also use it to interact with web services and APIs, such as OpenAI’s Chat Completions API for GPT-4o, which can generate text completions for any prompt or task. Yup, the thing that’s behind ChatGPT.