Article Archive
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When Labor Becomes Cheap, Motivation Becomes Everything
Frederick Taylor sold a bargain: trade autonomy for a safer life. In factories, that bargain raised living standards by pulling day labor into pred...
Authentication Methods That Work in 2026
Passwords are still everywhere but passkeys, WebAuthn, and modern OAuth flows have matured enough to replace them for most use cases. A practical o...
Developer, Not Engineer. And Why It Matters
The term 'software engineer' was coined as a deliberate provocation at a 1968 NATO conference. Sixty years later, Silicon Valley turned it into a r...
The Product Manager Is Dead. Long Live the Product Developer.
The person who walks into the room with Figma mockups and says 'build this' has run out of runway. AI collapsed the distance between understanding ...
Building Products in the Age of AI
Product development has fundamentally changed. The gap between having an idea and seeing it work used to be filled with weeks of scaffolding, synta...
When AI Becomes Your Thinking Partner
Most developers use AI as a glorified autocomplete. The real power comes when you stop asking for solutions and start having conversations about pr...
When Cloud Sounds Like Cheaper Hosting
Your company has been selling vertical software for 15 years. You have 50 employees, steady revenue, happy customers running your on-premise produc...
The End of Coding is the Return of Product Development
AI has solved the problem of translation — turning intent into syntax. That doesn't mean the job is gone. It means we are finally back to the probl...
When Methodology Becomes Identity
Methodologies start as tools. In captured organizations they become loyalty tests: technical disagreement is treated as disloyalty, governance turn...
Supply Chain Attacks: The Hidden Risk in Your Codebase
Every modern software project relies on hundreds or thousands of external dependencies. When one of those dependencies is compromised, the maliciou...
Modernizing Legacy VBA with AI and the Swiss Cheese Model
When your business runs on a decade-old application with VBA customizations that nobody fully understands, modernization isn't optional — it's surv...
Why Electricians Have Authority and Developers Don't
Electricians work with objective pass/fail states, codified standards, and inspectable outcomes. Software developers work with fuzzy requirements, ...
Skip the Framework Cycle: A Case for Technical Capability
Organizations reach for management frameworks when delivery hurts. But the pain is usually a capability gap, not a process gap. Invest in the peopl...
What Happened to Agile? A Field Guide for Teams Outside the USA
The frameworks didn't collapse; they became commercialized. Small teams at actual software vendors never needed elaborate process frameworks. The C...
The Gray Beard and the Machine
Martin had been writing software for twenty-seven years when the machine arrived. At first it felt like replacement — another cycle of the industry...
Web Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance
Modern browsers now support everything needed to build sophisticated, reactive web interfaces without React, Vue, or Angular. Web components, custo...
Beyond the Solo Developer Myth: Pair Programming, Mob Programming, and AI Collaboration
Pair programming has been around since the ENIAC days, yet it remains misunderstood and underutilized. This article explores the proven styles of c...
When Discovery Collides with Process: The Tension Inside Management Frameworks
Technical teams constantly discover better ways of working — through practice, through new tools, through the kind of learning that only happens wh...
AI as Your Legacy Code Archaeologist: Extracting Business Rules from VBA
Decades of business logic hide in customized VB6 applications where every customer installation has unique VBA code. Traditional approaches — readi...
Management Frameworks vs Visualization: Heavy Process or Light Insight?
Organizations often reach for elaborate management frameworks when they cannot see what is actually happening. But the root problem isn't missing p...
Management Frameworks and the Proximity to Snake Oil
Many management frameworks operate close to the snake oil line — selling beliefs and process models rather than verifiable outcomes. When the busin...
Governing Legacy Modernization: Oversight for the Strangler Fig
Legacy modernization rarely happens in neat phases anymore. The strangler fig pattern — incrementally replacing pieces of a legacy system while bot...
When Software Development Is Craft and When It Is Trade
Software development oscillates between two modes: craft, where skilled practitioners make judgment calls in novel situations, and trade, where est...
Iterative Design: What Software Can Learn from Rockets
SpaceX builds rockets the way great software teams build software — through rapid iteration, learning from failure, and relentless focus on the fee...
When "Developer Advocate" Meant Something Else
The term "Developer Advocate" has been co-opted comfortably by marketing departments. But originally, it meant a senior engineer with the authority...
Treating Developers With Respect
Respect for software developers is not a perk — it is a prerequisite for building anything worth using. Most developers are introverts who have no ...
We Don't Take Advice From Non-Developers
When critical decisions about software development are shaped by those who've never written production code, organizations pay a recurring tax: fai...
Technical Practices That Drive Business Results
Certain software development practices may sound purely technical, yet each one solves a concrete business problem — reducing risk, accelerating de...
Following the Plan Into the Mountain
On December 20, 1995, a highly trained crew flew a perfectly functioning aircraft into a Colombian mountainside. They followed their plan with prec...
Software Development Is Design: A Fresh Perspective for Business Leaders
Software development shares more with architecture, industrial design, and creative problem-solving than with manufacturing or construction. Unders...
It's Just a Simple Rewrite — A Story of Estimates, Egos, and Eventual Success
The leadership team was confident: twenty years of working Delphi code, clear requirements, and a modern Java stack. What followed was two and a ha...
Kubernetes for the Rest of Us: Starting Small with k3s
Kubernetes has earned a reputation as complex infrastructure reserved for large-scale operations. Yet modern lightweight distributions like k3s, co...
Cypress Beyond Testing: Executable Demos for Your Pipeline
What if every product demo you gave also served as a quality gate in your CI/CD pipeline? Cypress, traditionally positioned as an end-to-end testin...
Complexity in Software: What Non-Technical Leaders Need to Know
Software development is fundamentally complex, not merely complicated, yet most organizations manage it using approaches designed for predictable s...
Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969
Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBO...
Intrinsic Motivation and Software Developers
Intrinsic motivation is the quiet force behind the best software you've ever seen: the tools that feel thoughtfully crafted, the systems that behav...
Bridging the Great Divide
By bringing organizational intelligence and embedded technical advocacy into daily operations, organizations can replace assumptions with evidence ...
The Engine of Predictable Software Delivery
Predictable software delivery is not about magic; it's about discipline, amplified by AI. Core engineering practices — like test-first development,...
Why Leaders Must Own the Journey and Work ON the System — Not Delegate It
Methodologies cannot be installed like software. Big-bang rewrites fail — Netscape and Borland learned this the expensive way. Arbitrary deadlines ...
Reclaim Your Organization
Too many organizations lose their best developers not to better offers, but because of methods that treat humans like manufacturing inventory. Pred...
The CTO: Between Faith and Physics
Organizations crave predictability—frameworks, timeboxes, and budgets that promise control over software delivery. But software obeys its own laws:...
How to Govern Without Control
Leaders want both stability and innovation, but these forces pull in opposite directions. Many organizations reach for control—the illusion of safe...
Agile, Meet AI: Your Stand-Up Just Got Automated
For two decades, Agile transformed software development — moving teams from Gantt charts to working code, from waterfall to continuous delivery. Bu...
Grateful Boundaries: Consultants and Software Developers
Every successful transformation requires two distinct superpowers: consultants who can see and articulate systemic problems that insiders no longer...
Management Frameworks Don't Fix Software Teams—Gratitude and Software Development Do
Management frameworks arrive with canvases, ceremonies, and dashboards—tools that help organizations see their bottlenecks, overload, and rework. T...
Why the 'Raw Dogging' Team Beats the Factory Method
Management often treats software development as an assembly line—imposing process frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, or OKRs in pursuit of predictability...
What Is Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice where team members frequently integrate their work into the main codebase, ensuring that the software pro...
Why You Should Introduce a Senior Developer Advocate into Your Team
Making Software Development More Cost-Effective
Stoos Stampede 2012
July 2012, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 09 Jul 2012, By Stephan Schwab
Agile Roots 2012
June 2012, Salt Lake City, USA 05 Jul 2012, By Stephan Schwab
SF Agile 2012
June 2012, San Francisco, USA 04 Jul 2012, By Stephan Schwab
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Recent Articles
- When Labor Becomes Cheap, Motivation Becomes Everything (06.04.2026)
- Authentication Methods That Work in 2026 (03.04.2026)
- Developer, Not Engineer. And Why It Matters (30.03.2026)
- The Product Manager Is Dead. Long Live the Product Developer. (27.03.2026)
- Building Products in the Age of AI (23.03.2026)