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.

Much is written about lean startups, agile software development, continuous integration or even continuous deployment. All with the goal to help us understand the dynamics of successful software companies and their development teams. I am inspired by these stories, they show me what the ideal situation is like, they challenge me to improve our current way of working. Today I want to give something back. I want to share with.

Last week I gave a talk about the lessons learned during the exponential growth of our company the last six years. I was invited to to talk at the Appsterdam meetup in Delft about “growing pains”. In other words: what lessons did we learn when our company grew from 3 to 100 employees. I enjoyed the preparations as much as the actual talk, as it forced me to step back.

Do you believe in Model Driven Software Development? Do you believe in modeling languages on a higher abstraction level and automated transformations to an executable business application? I see Model Driven Software Development as an important part of the future of software development. However, I also see a lot of people struggle with actually using Model-Driven techniques and applying them in their daily business. It isn’t trivial to build a.

Last June I gave a presentation at the Code Generation 2010 conference in Cambridge. I really enjoyed the conference: great venue, great food, I met a lot of interesting people, and last but not least I participated in a lot of interesting sessions!