Conference Talks

The following is a list of talks I gave at conferences and/or meetups/usergroups.

If you’d like me to speak about the below or other topics, you can contact me

Engineering Management for everyone

Everybody has a manager, if they like it or not, if they actually work with them or not. Still, when reading typical IT focused web- or news sites there seems to be a somewhat common view, that managers are overhead at best and a hindrance at worst.

That’s why I want to show there is, actually a lot of, value in engineering management. I will do this by giving an overview of what’s considered to be part of an engineering manager’s job today. Be it proper 1on1-meetings, providing transparency into and context for a team’s work or constructive and actionable feedback. I will also include what everyone on a team can do, to have a good foundation for a functional relationship with their managers. Because management is a two-way street.

How do Agile & Scrum affect Quality - A Reality-Check

The original question that lead to this talk was asked by Marco Klemm, initiator and moderator of Agile Nacht Stuttgart. He asked (paraphrased) “do Agile & Scrum really hold their promise of increasing a project’s quality”?.

In this short talk I present my personal opinion and the experience of my last years as CTO of vaamo and argue, that while it’s possible to employ practices such as Agile, Scrum & Software Craftsmanship to increase the quality of software projects (for varying degrees of quality), the actually important factors and the biggest leverage to increase quality and success of projects, are the involved humans and their way of interacting with each other.

5 Years of Software Craftsmanship

… a Personal Take on How To Write Software Better.

Practices, (Management) Frameworks and opinions on how software should be built are as numerous as there are people on this planet.

A group of such opinions dubs itself Software Craftsmanship and calls for seeing a software development more as a craft instead of an engineering discipline.

I count myself among the Software Craftsmanship community since 2011. Since then I’ve been supporting and spreading the ideas of Software Craftsmanship. Be it by organizing user groups and conferences, by giving talks or via the continuous efforts incorporating Software Craftsmanship ideas and practices into my daily work as developer and manager.

In this talk I’ll look back over the last five years, the journey I’ve made as a software developer and developer of teams. I’ll share how my view on how to do software development better changed over this time.

Innovation & Value with Scala, not because

The talk first covers how we made our technology choice in favor of Scala. It continues to take a look at the wanted and unwanted consequences of this choice and closes with my thoughts on how, if at all, it enabled the team to deliver innovation and value to our business.

I presented the talk at the following conferences:

5 Leadership Hacks

A talk I gave at Entwicklertag Frankfurt on 24th February 2015.

In the talk I describe five practices, that are directly applicable to a wide range of teams and circumstances, which can help you lead others.

After describing those “hacks” I lay down the fundamentals of why those practices work and how you can take your leadership skills to the next level.

Sane Secrets Sharing

A talk I gave in the Ignite format on 24th October 2014 at the Berlin DevOps Days.

In this talk I describe how we share secrets inside the vaamo development & operations team, and how we integrate them into our Chef-based Configuration Management.

Event Sourcing in der Praxis

A talk about Event Sourcing I gave, together with Johannes Seitz, at the Entwicklertag Frankfurt 2014 and the Developer Week 2014

Architectural Katas

At the 2012 SoCraTes I gave two sessions about Architectural Katas.

The format was created initially by Ted Neward in response to the lack of practical exercises for software architects. Small groups solve a given project together (which is similar to a very simple RFP - Request for Proposal) in a short amount of time and present it to the other groups afterwards to “defend” it.

Participants of both sessions were very surprised how hard it is to come up with a meaningful (or even good) architecture in a short amount of time, and even more so to convey it to other groups. They also acknowledged the usefulness to practice this kind of architecting in addition to the usual coding practices.

As far as I know, it was the first Architectural Kata held in germany.

Later that year, I also facilitated a Architectural Kata session at the XPDays DE conference.

Soziale Netze Integrieren

German talk, held at web-devcon in Hamburg, Germany on 18-Dec-2011.

APIs und Mashups sind alte Bekannte für beinahe jeden Web-Entwickler. Dennoch hat die Nutzung von APIs erst mit dem Erscheinen und dem Erfolg von Google, Twitter und Facebook, den bisher einzigen wirklichen “API Billionaires”, so richtig begonnen. Die Integration von Social Networks mittels ihrer jeweiligen APIs gehört also in den Werkzeugkasten jedes ernstzunehmenden Web-Entwicklers. Dieser Vortrag behandelt, für was die APIs der Social Networks verwendet werden können, welche Herausforderungen bei der Nutzung der APIs bestehen, wie man mit Ihnen umgeht und wie am Ende die Architektur der eigenen Anwendung durch die Integration von APIs nicht unnötig belastet wird.