I talk to a lot of companies and work at quite a few companies as contractor or consultant. Quite often I hear management complain about how hard it is to get good developers, and also that developers leave again after a while. Now, there are many reasons why it can be hard to find the…
I had sitting in travel not being able to do anything. Listening to music can help, but can end up also being frustrating. While I was working at Schiphol last year I got pointed to podcasts. Since then I’ve been really getting into listening to podcasts on my daily commute and it’s been making the…
The great thing about the server architectures we have these days is that everything is scalable (if you set it up correctly). The hard thing about the server architectures we have these days is that everything is scalable (if you set it up correctly). Yeah, I know. One of the things you may run into…
Recently I got an email from someone who was interested in coming to WeCamp, but needed some more information to help convince their manager. I wrote a big email trying to describe WeCamp and our ideas of what WeCamp is (or should be). Since this may actually be useful to more people that want to…
I recently found myself in a discussion on whether or not exceptions could be used to control program flow in software (specifically in PHP applications). That triggered me to post a tweet: Exceptions should not be used to control expected application flow. Discuss….@skoop This triggered quite a bit of discussion, which gave me a lot…
I’ve been running this blog on Sculpin for quite a while now, and I’m quite happy with how that works. We’ve been in a process of migrating some of our websites off a standard VPS towards a setup with Docker, Gitlab CI and Rancher. I’ve now migrated some websites, which is relatively easy, but most…
It’s been a while since I’ve done a post like this, but given the focus of the upcoming events I thought I’d give a small overview of my upcoming speaker appearances. Why? For 2017 I want to once again focus a bit more on building bridges. I’ve done this a couple of years ago but…
Can you write me a simple script that fetches some information from an RSS feed and displays the titles? Like, just write me that script in a couple of minutes. I don’t care about tests, quality, etc. Just get me the information, quickly. I’m curious how you would handle this request. A couple of years…
I know I’m late with this, but I’ve only recently really been discovering the podcast as a way of keeping informed. My daily commute is quite long because of traffic jams and a good way to keep yourself occupied with something useful is to listen to podcasts. On one of my recent commutes I started…
Last year I already wrote about different initiatives in the period leading up to Christmas. In one of my talks this year, Level Up Your Team I’ve been discussing many ways of learning, and for this year I want to highlight one of the initiatives that I participated in last year, and again am trying…