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 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

The Paradox of Freedom

Hi,

The Paradox of Freedom: The more options we have, the more anxious we become that we chose the wrong thing.

~ Mark Manson

Mark Manson is not a software developer. He is an author. His bestseller: “THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK”

He provides self-help for people who hate self-help books. In this paradox, he refers to life decisions. For example, many people find it hard to enter into a love relationship via Tinder. The options are so vast that with each date, you think you might have something better.

Marcus Held

Quickdraw Hero

Hi,

In the team of one of my clients, I earned the nickname “Quickdraw Hero”

(My surname “Held” translates to hero in english 😉)

Because I shoot so fast.

I gained this reputation from the team rather quickly. At that time, it was meant somewhat derogatorily.

The team was not accustomed to my pace.

They had gotten comfortable. The software has been in development for more than 10 years. And over time, substantial technical debt had accumulated. It was a creeping process.

Marcus Held