Category: Uncategorized
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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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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…
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The Amber Trap
Last week I was cleaning out some old project folders (a therapeutic exercise I recommend to any one). I learned that from a fellow architect. Does this spark joy? Anywho, I stumbled upon a perfectly preserved architecture document from 2018. Complete with detailed diagrams, stakeholder matrices, and decision rationales that read like artifacts from a…
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Engineering doesn’t solve problems…
Yes, the zeroth law! Engineering doesn’t solve problems… Martijn Veldkamp July 10, 2025 We just trade them in for newer, more interesting ones. And that’s our real job. You ever spend a week with your team fixing a critical system, finally push the fix live and feel that wave of relief? Only to get a…
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Engineering doesn’t solve problems…
We just trade them in for newer, more interesting ones. And that’s our real job. You ever spend a week with your team fixing a critical system, finally push the fix live and feel that wave of relief? Only to get a Slack message two months later. “Hey, weird question. Ever since we deployed that…
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AI Agents: Microservices with God Complexes
I have been reading a lot of all the AI innovations that the new Agentic AI promises. Not just watching Muppet show episodes. I particular like the integrations of said agents. MCP, A2A or the new LOKA. It looks a lot like the beginning of Microservices. So, I see the potential benefits of agentic integration,…
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The Human Side of Automation
Little Britain The Human Side of Automation Martijn Veldkamp April 10, 2025 We plan our technology implementations. We map our approach, define KPIs, and anticipate efficiency gains. Yet, even the most crafted AI initiative or Salesforce rollout can stumble on the human element. As we automate and streamline, we sometimes overlook the real people who…
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The Low-Hanging Fruit Diet: Nutritionally Deficient in Strategic Value
“We are kept from our goals not by obstacles but by a clear path to lesser goals.” I’m not sure who pointed me in the the direction of Robert Brault, but I love that quote. This resonates with me on different levels. If I hear low hanging fruit one more time, I’m going to scream!…
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T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L.
DALL- is so much fun. T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L. Martijn Veldkamp March 14, 2025 As I was rewatching and really enjoying the Expanse series, I remembered the books that made me a SF nerd. AE van Vogt, Jack Vance and Heinlein. James SA Corey’s The Expanse is a great space opera. Anyway, I am rereading The Moon is…
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Architectural OCD
A couple of week’s ago the Fridays Nonsense post by Karsten Scherer had an interesting topic that had me thinking about internal systems. He mentioned systems that we are not aware of, until they stop working. For example your inner ear balance. That post kickstarted my thinking about switching between unconscious and conscious. Becoming aware…