Author: MartijnVeldkamp
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Designing Systems for companies that don’t exist
Every architecture decision I make comes with a second document nobody asked for. Not the system diagram. The org chart the system will eventually force into existence. Most architecture reviews end after the first one. That is where I start asking uncomfortable questions. The question nobody puts on the agenda Before I sign off on…
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The Depreciation Nobody Books
The CFO asked me why we needed to spend €2M on a foundational piece of the platform nobody would see. I explained the architecture. She nodded politely and asked again. I had given her the right answer in the wrong language. I’ve thought about that meeting a lot. Not because I was wrong about the…
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What I would tell the Board
I have given many board updates on technology. I have been honest in all of them. I have also, in all of them, chosen which honest things to say. This is not a confession. It is a description of how the role works. A board update is not a brain dump. It is a curated…
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Why Agents are Slowing Us Down (and Why That’s Okay)
I’ve seen more posts then I care for where someone proudly presents a dashboard tracking “tokens consumed” as the team’s primary AI productivity metric. Not bugs fixed. Not features shipped. Not incidents avoided. Tokens. As if buying more plane tickets proves you’re traveling somewhere useful. It would be funny if it wasn’t setting up some…
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AI Coding Tools: a bit of a time machine
I think that most people can relate. Over time my career and role shifted. Less time building things directly, more time designing systems, reviewing architectures, and guiding teams. Important work, but further away from the joy of experimenting and writing code. During my Christmas break something changed. Tools like Claude Code have fundamentally changed. They…
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The Second Opinion that wasn’t
You asked ChatGPT whether your strategy made sense. It gave you five well-reasoned paragraphs explaining why it did. You felt better. That feeling is the problem. We have quietly started using AI as a sounding board for big decisions. Architecture choices, technology bets, platform strategies, build-vs-buy calls. We share our thinking, ask the model to…
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Why Single-Lens thinking is harming your Architecture Decisions
# Why Single-Lens thinking is harming your Architecture Decisions During summer when the mosquitos were swarming around our farm, a dragonfly hovered right in front of me. Just hung there, mid-air, perfectly still. My dogs didn’t notice. I couldn’t stop staring. There’s something almost alien about how a dragonfly moves. It can fly in six…
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The Slow Death of the Developer Who Knows Why Things Work
I’ve spent the last few weeks navigating two different kinds of grief. One is personal. The other is professional: watching the slow, agonizing death of the “Developer Who Knows Why Things Work.” Grief does something useful, though. It strips away your tolerance for nonsense. When you’re running on fumes, you don’t have the energy for…
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Can you handle it?
The current evolution from prompt engineering to autonomous AI agents has accidentally validated decades of management theory. These latest generation of AI…
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Escaping the Feature Factory
We spent the last decade obsessing over speed. We adopted Agile, we SCRUMmed, did the DevOps, and we measured our success by velocity and deployment frequency. For the most part, this was a necessary evolution. Business moves too fast for waterfall. Waterfall did have some benefits as well, but that maybe my age and only…