Author: moritz

This is me being cynical. I’ve turned into a person that is more prone to disliking building new flashy things, and rather suggests to leverage existing things. Good engineering organisations don’t measure success by looking at the amount of things built, but by the value created. Two incredibly different things. One thing I find remarkable […]

Without getting to hooked up on how you specifically call it, most organisations I’ve worked for had some notion of the idea of “bias to action”. Whether it was “get shit done”, “JFDI” (for just f**** do it) or “done is better than perfect”, the idea is pretty much the same – you want to […]

The only constant is change. Generally true, even more so in software engineering. Shit changes all the time. Requirements, Milestones, Team Compositions, Technologies, Best Practices. Nothing is static. That’s probably the reason why I’m so intent on leading my teams to a state where they are primarily really good at adapting to change – regardless […]

A little while ago a coworker pointed to the problem that he doesn’t understand how I come up with decisions, what my criteria are. There’s probably a million answers to that, but since the topic was system design, it got me thinking. What are my guardrails, my thought processes when it comes to designing systems […]

Refactorings, clean ups, consolidations – doesn’t matter what you call it, but there’s something calming about finding ways to touch code without the intent to functionally change or improve it. It’s like cleaning the workshop. And much like cleaning the workshop, there’s an art to focussing disproportionately on actually: deleting code. Deleting code is the […]

Every team emits or radiates some kind of energy. Some teams are lethargic, others are friendly. There’s cold teams, teams that aren’t teams but more a collection of ICs, pretty much all states that social groups can have, you find in teams as well – since they’re pretty much social groups to begin with. Groups, […]

When dealing with software systems in any of the larger organisations I was working, legacy things are a big topic. Whether that’s a big legacy system that is basically immutable, or just really complicated components of a system that is actually still kind of in development. There’s some attributes that those systems, in my view […]

Here’s an observation: The less risk there is in doing something, the more time you spend to speak about it. This is about decision making in organisations, and it’s something that just struck me today. I’ve been in situations where taking risks was just part of the routine – with the occasionally bad outcome that […]

Ok, let’s talk about focus. I learned a parenting hack a few weeks ago. One that really helped me to smoothen some previously tense or potentially tense situations. Whenever I need my toddlers to do something – like put on clothes, brush teeth, some part of the routine, and they’d be opposed to it (which […]

I used to have a habit of wrapping up my day by writing 500 words. As it happens with habits, I dropped that one and got a bunch of others in its place. Looking back, I feel the 500 words helped me to reflect on the matters of the day, or to conclude or continue […]