Blog

During my career, I’ve been involved in different digital transformations, ranging from financial to telco institutions. Those digital transformations aim to evolve the operating model (or parts of it) and bring digital capabilities to the forefront. As part of it, new ways of working are implemented, which leads to new practices to manage capabilities. You might recognise those digital transformations by other names, such as Agile transformation, DevOps transformation, or cloud transformation.

Today, most companies have a CTO. Title, responsibilities, and expectations of the job may vary per company, as there is no singular definition of a “CTO”. But what I notice from various assignments in the software and technology industry is a convergence of the skills required to fill the role of a CTO.

When being part of an enterprise, you will meet different architects on any given day. The first one introduces itself as a solution architect, the other calls itself the enterprise architect, and they both mention a domain architect. It might feel like different names for the same thing, and perhaps even a bigger question, do we even need all of these different architects? Should the team not be able to make all of these architectural decisions by themselves?

We are on a quest….

As a parent, I have the gift to see my daughter grow. I’m learning every single day, and I’ve some learnings that apply to organisations, allowing people and teams to be autonomous

Chaos Engineering is perceived as a technical practice. However, it can be leveraged as a management practice to create a safe environment for individuals and teams. It is one of the practices that an organisation can leverage to be anti-fragile.

Team Topologies is the work of Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, and I use it as part of my job. From a sociotechnical perspective, a team-first approach is paramount for any organisation and helps to decrease the accidental complexity. As such, I’m often asked ‘How can we operate in DevOps?’ or ‘How can I have a reliable service to deliver value to my customer?’.

EventStorming is a visual collaboration technique, invented by Alberto Brandolini. This post will not go into the details of EventStorming, and you can find useful resources on the web. Instead, I will share learning from the many sessions that I facilitated!

The most important learning during my career is that the act of creating software is a team effort. We can be a one-person team, but there is someone else involved; at least someone to use it.

Did the title tease you? Great, job is done! Today I will tell you my story about Integration Tests; it came after another knowledge share lunch with my pal Kenny.

There are 2 systems in any company that are critical: the payroll system, and the CI/CD system. Why? You may ask…
If the payroll system doesn’t work, people will leave the company and the company (may) face legal problems; the CI/CD system is the gateway to production. If it is down and there is a bug in production, it will affect your business; loss of revenue, loss of customers, loss of money, just to name a few.

One of my passions is to be a trainer. Sharing knowledge, meeting new people, be continuously challenged, it fuels my brain, and I’m always learning something new. I’m creating a new training for software development teams, and one of the components is a MySQL database. Also, I’m using a public cloud provider (in this case AWS), and Xebia provides accounts to cover training, workshops and our own experiments.

Last week, Kenny Baas and I, delivered 2 talks with live coding. We were at NextBuild (with From EventStorming to CoDDDing) and Techorama NL (with Improving design and code quality with Property-based testing).

Today Serverless is a thing. Although everyone can write a blog post about how Serverless run on servers, I share the same visions as Mathias Verraes

Magento 2 is the leading Open Source Software for e-commerce, with a vibrant community and proper product documentation.

Last summer a good friend of mine challenged me to help him move his Magento webshop from an on-premises server to the cloud. Also, to upgrade the webshop to the newest version (Magento 2).

As a developer, I’m a big fan of automation. I can’t create software where I need to push buttons and run manual scripts, to test & deploy it. To help me automate my software development tasks, I use Cake, "a cross platform build automation system with a C# DSL".

he first conference that I attend since we arrived in The Netherlands was the TechDays NL 2017. The conference is sponsored by Microsoft, and it’s one of the most significant tech events in the Benelux area. However, even being sponsored by Microsoft, other streams of the industry were present, showing that Microsoft is no longer "the evil".

Last week we had our annual Hackathon, my first at Coolblue. Here we are taken to a remote location for 3 days to hack away. I joined a team who wants to build an application to measure the happiness in Coolblue. Wait, measure happiness? How?

Here at Coolblue, we can choose our tools from a range of technologies. A while ago, our team started moving from Microsoft MSTest to xUnit.

During my career, I learned on the hardest way how a poor codebase can be harmful to the business. I witness behaviours in teams such as:

AppVeyor is one of the Continuous Integration Services in the cloud, ready to use, with minimal configuration. It provides a Windows Server image with tooling to build, test and deploy ours .NET applications. Among the baseline software is .NET Core, however, the version is 1.0.4 (at the time of writing this post).

Docker is one of the disruptive technologies within virtualization, allowing the different containers to run on the same machine, sharing resources, reducing the overhead. The technology allows DevOps teams to have another tool to develop, build and ship software. One use case for containers is the Microservices Architecture Pattern.

AWS Lambda is one of the AWS Compute Services, alongside with Amazon EC2 or Amazon EC2 Container Service. In a nutshell, AWS Lambda is the serverless offer from AWS, allowing "you run code without provisioning or managing servers".

Microsoft is doing a huge effort to bring SQL Server 2016 to Linux. Back in the summer, during the Dublin 2016 SQL Saturday 501, Mark Souza presented the SQL Server history. One of the major features is the ability to run SQL Sever 2016 on Linux.