Hot Topic

How to Tell If Your Software Development Is Off Track

May 15, 2026

Latest Posts

SME Software Development February 8, 2024

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

SME Software Development February 5, 2024

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

SME Software Development February 2, 2024

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

SME Software Development January 26, 2024

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

SME Software Development December 20, 2023

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