The #1 Problem in SMEs

Hi,

As written on Monday : Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have no problem with performance.

However, that’s not entirely true. Over the past few years, I’ve worked on many products that were slow. Improving performance would have been positive for the business. In certain areas, like the gaming industry, it was inevitable to be performant. Retention is one of the most important metrics in the industry. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

Marcus Held

I Never Sold The Performance Workshop

Hi,

I haven’t sold my Spring Performance Workshop even once.

Instead, I sold my Architecture Discovery Workshop four times . In 6 months.

And I don’t even promote it 🤷

What does this mean for me?

My positioning as a performance expert has failed.

But not because I can’t deliver.
There’s simply no demand from my customers.

In hindsight, it makes sense. But let me explain:

Ever since I’ve been developing software, I’ve been working in small and medium-sized enterprises, known as SMEs. These companies have between 5 and 50 developers, occasionally a few more.

Marcus Held

The VPN Paradox

Hi,

Especially in software development, many people work who are particularly good at abstraction and objective consideration of problems and questions.

It’s in the nature of the thing. It’s our job to thoroughly understand a problem in detail. And the solutions always require weighing the pros and cons.

But there are always problems and habits that have become entrenched in our industry that, objectively viewed, make no sense.

Our use of VPNs is ambivalent

Marcus Held

The ADM-3A Keyboard

Hi,

What does this computer have to do with your work today?

You are looking at an ADM-3A from 1976.

But why should this computer still interest you nearly 50 years later?

The ADM-3A is the reason for some standards you use today

Take a look at the keyboard layout:

Why do people still use esc to enter command mode in vi?

On the ADM-3A, the esc key was right next to Q.
It was easily accessible.

Marcus Held

The Monitoring Tool Jungle

Hi,

Here’s the translation of the text into English:

For years, my holy trinity in monitoring has been:

• Grafana for metrics
• Elastic for logs and tracing
• And Sentry for error tracking

With this stack, I have been moving from project to project for years. For some reason, I always ended up in projects that used this stack.

Maybe Loki was used instead of Elastic sometimes (ugh - I don’t like Loki 😉) .

Marcus Held