Category: Architecture
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Luxury Amnesia
Every summer I do something that, on paper, makes no sense. I leave a farm that has hot water, rain shower, a real bed, and three horses who expect breakfast, and I go sleep in a field, on purpose, in a tent. Where the water comes out of a communal tap forty meters away and…
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LinkedIn respects your privacy
There is a fence near where I walk the dogs. It runs about fifteen meters along the edge of a field and then simply stops. It connects to nothing, it keeps nothing in and nothing out. On both sides is the same wet Dutch grass and the same indifferent sheep. For years I have looked…
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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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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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Architecture as a Coaching Discipline
There is an old, persistent stereotype of the Enterprise Architect. They sit in a metaphorical ivory tower, disconnected from the reality of the development teams. They draw perfect, complex diagrams of a future state that will never exist. And their primary output is the word “No.” As in “No, you can’t use that framework.” “No,…
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Balancing Act: Robustness with Customer Focus
AI of course, still in love with nano banana Balancing Act: Robustness with Customer Focus Martijn Veldkamp "Strategic Technology Leader | Customer’s Virtual…
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Our systems are only stable on weekends. And we call that innovation?
Ever notice the silence of a Saturday? No urgent Slack pings. No panicked emails about a failed deployment. Dependency doom? The monitoring dashboards are all…