The case for strong leadership in agile teams

The case for strong leadership in agile teams

The key to scaling a software engineering organization is stable teams. A while ago I wrote about the need to focus on stable, autonomous teams. Teams with members that trust each other and thereby become more than the sum of their parts. That is, in the end, the ultimate dream of a software development manager: to create cross-functional, self-organizing, high-performance teams. Teams self-organize around a compelling mission and have a.

Smart Apps for the Enterprise – Mendix World 2016 keynote

Smart Apps for the Enterprise – Mendix World 2016 keynote

Last years Mendix World was centered around Smart Apps. It was the best conference of the year. At least in my opinion, I might be biased… The conference had a great speaker line-up, including keynotes from Geoffrey Moore, Simon Wardley, and Adrian Cockcroft. All slides and videos can be found here. I had the honor to announce Mendix 7, our latest major release. I explored the topic of Smart Apps.

How MDD brings business relevance to the PaaS space

How MDD brings business relevance to the PaaS space

It seems that we have past the top of the hype around Platform-as-a-Service. A good moment to assess how serious the adoption of PaaS is in the enterprise. The different PaaS flavours It’s a while ago that I tried to structure and categorize the different cloud approaches to clarify the different types of “cloud” that we see in todays market.  I distinguished among 3 layers of Platform-as-a-Service (and some more layers that.

Opening up the Mendix model specification & tools ecosystem

Opening up the Mendix model specification & tools ecosystem

There is something interesting going on in our industry. From the inception of the first programming language we always have been uncovering new ways to program computers. New ways triggered by new hardware architectures and new ways triggered by developers wanting languages that are easier to grasp and are more productive. We have made major steps from machine code to today’s higher-level modern languages. However, over the last decade it.

The rise of Rapid Application Delivery through Model-Driven PaaS

The rise of Rapid Application Delivery through Model-Driven PaaS

Last month I was in Barcelona at the HP Discover conference and I followed the coverage of DockerCon a bit as well. Two conferences, the first from one of the largest tech companies on the planet, a company which inception was one of the triggers of the start of what we now call Silicon Valley. The second conference organized by a relatively new company that you could consider a far offspring.

PaaS is lacking a vision on application development

PaaS is lacking a vision on application development

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is all about abstraction and automation. Abstracting away from underlying technology layers by automation. That’s basically what is happening on each layer of a cloud architecture, from hardware to IaaS, to foundational PaaS, to aPaaS. All this abstraction and automation is aimed at making application deployment a one-click or one-command experience for the developer. It makes deployment a self-service experience for the developer, which eliminates hand-offs and thus improves.

Lessons learned in managing engineering team growth

Lessons learned in managing engineering team growth

Over the last couple of years the engineering team at Mendix has grown fast. Over the last 1.5 years the team has almost doubled and we are still looking for bright minds. There is a lot that can and will go wrong if you grow this fast. Here are my four most important lessons learned during the process (disclaimer: a lesson learned doesn’t necessarily mean that I execute it flawlessly.

From Software-Defined to Metadata-Driven

From Software-Defined to Metadata-Driven

Software is eating the world! Every company is becoming a software company. If companies don’t, they cease to exist. Just imagine: you are a thermostat maker and suddenly you have Google as a competitor (via its Nest acquisition). This is just one of the many recent examples. Interestingly a lot of the innovations in the software industry are fuelled by abstraction and automation, concepts that are well-known in the Model-Driven.

Mendix World 2014 keynote full video

Mendix World 2014 keynote full video

A couple of weeks ago we had Mendix World, our global community event. I really enjoyed the event! It was inspiring to talk with so many of our users, customers, and partners, and to just feel the vibe. If you missed it you can get a glimpse of the experience from this photo overview as well as all the content on the Mendix World recap page. I opened the second.

Software is disrupting Industries: are you Trendwatcher or Trendsetter?

Software is disrupting Industries: are you Trendwatcher or Trendsetter?

A couple of months ago I was keynote speaker at an event about modern application development environments. Here are the slides and a brief abstract.