Notes
A collection of thoughts and articles at different development stages
The Subscription Trap: Why "Just Add Billing" Fails
The Subscription Trap: Why “Just Add Billing” Fails Digital products and SaaS models have made recurring billing the default. It’s stable, it’s predictable, and from the outside, it looks solved. We have incredible payment infrastructure now—Stripe, Paddle, Adyen—so the assumption is that the hard work is done. You have a sales channel (app, landing page, or B2B sales team), an engineering team building the thing, and finance counting the money.
MPS Community Meetup: where is the community
I was genuinely excited. Looking at the MPS Slack the numbers have grown to over 1100 members over the past years, I was expecting lots new names and topics on the agenda. The bigger my disappointment when I looked at the actual agenda.
Why I dislike mob programming
Today I tweeted this, rather polemic, tweet about mob programming: I think mob programming is torture. Don't @ me. — Kolja (@dumdidum) August 14, 2021 One reply asked me to explain why and replied with a couple of thoughts on it. This post sums them up once more and adds more details. But first a little disclaimer: This is my personal view based on personal experience and how I feel about mob programming.
Stop the glorification of coding, a rant
Why do we still glorify programming like it’s an field of work that’s more like art than work? With superstars and ninjas. Yes there some people who have a lot of freedom at their companies and who have a tremendous amount of fun at work. But let’s face it the majority of people don’t when they do coding. For them it’s job not a passion and there is nothing wrong with that.
FOSDEM slides
On Sunday I have given a talk about mbeddr and how we build it at FODESM. You can find the slides at speakerdeck where you can also download them as a PDF. And here you can find the original Keynote 6 files. The talk was also recorded and I will post the link once it is available.
moving on
As some of you might have noticed there where some recent changes in my professional life. I am really happy to announce that I am now working for Itemis, the company behind mbeddr, as a team member of the mbeddr team. Markus already mentioned this on the mbeddr blog. This also implies that I left BKR Software the company that I was working for before. It was an exiting one and a half year where I meet many interesting people and was able to some exciting projects.