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The time I literally dropped a server

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This is a short story about one of the stupidest things I ever did in my professional life, namely, dropping a physical server from the top of the rack in a data center. Spring is my favorite season, summer is actually better, but in spring it's clear that winter is over and summer is coming up. In early 2014 I was driving from the Mendix office in Rotterdam to our co-location data center (DC for short) in Amsterdam. I felt fantastic, and for a couple of reasons: I was driving my new car, I was paid to do an important job with a $10k 1U server in the boot, and as the cherry on top, it was finally  spring  and the weather was great! There have not many times in my life I felt this wonderful. Little did I know that I was now at the top of a rollercoaster, and on the way back I would feel very different. All of the physical servers at Mendix had Pokemon names. The one in my car was called Flareon. It had broken down a couple of weeks before and had gotten fixed by Hans, our ...
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Energy Driven Development

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Over the years I've noticed a pattern when I'm developing software. When faced with a huge backlog of things to pick up, I tend to go with the tasks that give me the most energy. I've been calling this Energy Driven Development in my head. My team leads / PMs must have hated this back in the day, because I was often only giving a halfhearted attempt at the official sprint items, but I believe that it's often the right approach. When I wake up, and in the shower I'm already thinking about a problem and how to solve it, I should probably be working on that. What personally gives me energy is if there are "deep problems" that require an elegant solution, so if you let me focus on those things, you get a well-organized codebase out of it, making all future development a lot easier. I believe that if you have good engineers with a product mindset, they will have a well-developed intuition for what to work on. So if you're managing a backlog and are stuck in...
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10x teams

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As I've written before , I've seen teams work in incredible burst of productivity. We achieved 10x productivity for a week or so at a time. I've always been fascinated by it. Wouldn't it be great if we can get closer to these peaks in our day-to-day? Having now seen dozens of teams in various situations, I think the ingredients for having the perfect storm of productivity are: Team wants to work for someone who cares about what they do. There is focus and clear priority for the work to be done. The team has the right resources at hand. You probably can't achieve 10x performance consistently, but most mission-driven startups get very close. If you have the feeling that something is wrong with your team's output, you can use the following flow-chart to find problems. Here's a PDF version .
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Bakelite to the Future - 1950s rotary phone ESP32 bluetooth headset

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Edit: since creating this post I've also created a video about this project on YouTube. See it below or jump straight into all the details below. Here's a very beautiful antique rotary phone. It's a Dutch PTT phone model called simply "1950" . But, what's this at the back? A USB-C port? A peek inside shows us some weird things! How did that LiPO battery get there? Ok let's quit the jokey intro, this was all me. I've had this phone for about 15 years and over the last couple of weeks I've converted into a fully functioning Bluetooth headset using an ESP32 microcontroller. In this post: - 1 - Features - 2 - Lessons Learned - 3 - Pictures and story!  of how it got made (scroll down!) but first... Does it work? This morning was the first Google meet I've used it in: A participant reported on the sound quality "I didn't know how much I missed the different sound quality! Beautiful. We could hear you very well, not distorted. I wish I record...
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The Future of Programming Systems - four thoughts

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Last week I gave a 20 minute mini talk at M&I Partners in Zeist about the Future of Programming Systems, and how the work of architects and engineering teams will grow closer together in the future. I'm completely obsessed by this topic so I'm excited! Here is that talk expressed in a blog post, slightly modified based on some feedback and new thoughts. Ok! Thank you for inviting me and sorry for not keeping to the original format as requested. I proposed this idea instead and it was accepted, so in part Matthijs (the organizer) is to blame and I hope it is OK with all of you as well ;) When cycling here, I realized I needed to make a last minute change and added "Systems" to the title. I believe that limiting ourselves to the activities of the programmer is too narrow, and we should have solutions that involve everyone who is in the lifecycle of software. So it's about the System  and that includes the designers, architects, users, database administrators, o...
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