Blog - My thoughts and ideas

My blogging frequency has gone down significantly so what you'll find here are mainly older articles and the occasional comment.

Speaking at conferences January 25th 2019

I’ve had the opportunity to be invited as speaker to several software engineering conferences during the last couple of years.

Interestingly, when talking about this to friends and colleagues a typical reaction when they hear this is: “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do that as well but I’m simply not good enough” or similar comments.

As I had the same doubts before actually doing it I’d like to lay out a few thoughts about speaking on conferences and why you are most likely good enough, no matter what you may think.

Confessions of a Ruby convert November 30th 2018

I have been developing applications in Java for the last 15 years. I know the language, I know the API, I know all the important frameworks and at one point I even felt arrogant enough to talk about the Java internals at conferences.

But for BetterDoc I had to use Ruby as my main programming language. I still try to sneak in a little bit of Java here and there, but Ruby is what I’m doing most of the time.

It feels a little bit like learning how to crawl again after having been an athlete. It’s a mixture between excitement, frustration, and pure embarrassment.

The story I want to write about in this post falls into the last category: pure embarrassment.

Don't be afraid to learn a foreign language November 15th 2018

Like many other professions software engineering has its own language, its own vocabulary and its own conventions. However as software engineers in order to do our job well we need to collaborate with people outside of our own profession - which means we have to find a way to communicate efficiently so that we all understand each other.

Why having good working equipment is not a nice to have November 5th 2018

As a software engineer having the right equipment (a powerful machine and high quality peripherals) is not simply a “nice to have” but an essential requirement. These are your main tools with which you’re doing your job - and everyone should want you to do that job as best as possible.