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SMEs, Steer Clear of Microservices!

April 15, 2024

Latest Posts

Entwicklungspraxis August 21, 2023

The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

Hi, “The VPN should not be operated by you [Sysadmins].” After this sentence, I saw startled faces. It slipped out of me. During the weekly Jour Fixe between the developers and admins. It came to the question of what our priorities are. It hit a nerve. Probably not because the participants are emotionally attached to the VPN. Probably not because the statement is wrong. No - it’s more likely because it’s so unconventional for the team.

Marcus Held

Software-Architektur August 17, 2023

State Is the Root of All Evil

Hi, What distinguishes an application from a (mathematical) function? A function takes an input x and transforms it into an output. If f(x) = 2 * x, then the result of this function for the input of any x is always the same. There are no side effects. We call this behavior stateless. But what does this have to do with the question from the beginning? An application goes beyond this. (Almost) every application must work with state. As soon as we have I/O operations in our system, we inherently have state. And often a method call, with the same input, can yield different results at different times. And this is also unavoidable and is in the nature of the task we want to solve.

Marcus Held

Entwicklungspraxis August 14, 2023

The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety

Hi, Last week, emotions were running high. One of my clients achieved something extraordinary. They have successfully operated a product for 10 years. Highly profitable. But the project was not started by trained developers. It began as a side product. The initial developers were career changers. Highly interested, motivated, engaged, and experts in their domain. And they accomplished something that fails in 9 out of 10 cases. Their product is actively used. Customers happily pay for it. It solves a real problem. In a niche that hardly any other company can occupy.

Marcus Held

Softwareentwicklung im Mittelstand August 10, 2023

7.500 Euro Loss

Hi, Our intuition often plays tricks on us. Especially in statistics. Humans are not made to intuitively understand statistical relationships. For example, the Birthday Paradox . What do you think? What’s the probability that in a room with 23 people, two have the same birthday? 5%? 10%? 20%? … Wrong. The probability is 50%. If you look at two classrooms, statistically, one class will have a shared birthday. In a room with 50 people, the probability is even over 97%.

Marcus Held

Entwicklungspraxis August 7, 2023

Improvement of Daily Work: The Third Ideal

Hi, In Chinese, there is a famous saying: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” We know this in software development too. We keep complaining about the mistakes we made back then. “Should do that someday.” This is a sentence that comes up in every second retrospective. Technical debt is piling up. “Should do that someday.” The daily usually takes too long. “Should do that someday.”

Marcus Held