Ideas

Stop obsessing over the perfect prompt

LLMs are built for conversation, not incantations. The value isn't in your opening message, it's in the back-and-forth: clarifying, correcting, refining. Iteration is cheap. The conversation is the work.

A founder's commitment to their engineering team

Founders juggle endless demands, investors, sales, suppliers, and employees, all while building the plane mid-flight. But with engineering often being your biggest expense, there's one responsibility you can't delegate: ensuring your team builds the right thing.

The unbundling of engineering value (Part 2)

AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.

The unbundling of engineering value (Part 1)

Here's part one of a post I shared with our team on the radical change and evolution of our jobs. AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.

A letter to my son: Growing up in the AI world

Reflecting on whether teaching traditional coding skills still makes sense in 2026. Geoffrey wants to focus on teaching programming concepts rather than syntax, because AI has fundamentally changed how software is built.

On the imminent retirement of the keyboard - the future of software engineering

By 2030, nobody will write code anymore and here is why. The difference between agent-powered engineers and those who handcraft code is huge. Here's our prediction on software engineering.

The hidden cost of multiple repositories

Go for one codebase or multiple repositories? A question multiple CTOs and technical founders have asked. It can be a surprisingly expensive decision nobody warns you about.

How AI is quietly killing open source

LLMs generate code on demand, but they do not replace maintainers, communities, or years of shared learning. This piece explores how AI-assisted coding risks fragmenting logic, increasing technical debt, and slowly eroding the open source ecosystem.

Communicate or be micromanaged - the engineering edition

Micromanagement rarely starts with bad intent. It usually starts with silence. When nobody knows what you are working on, meetings multiply, trust erodes, and focus disappears. This piece shows how clear, boring communication is your best defence.

Your startup does not need more engineers, it needs fewer mistakes

Hiring to fix velocity often multiplies your problems. Reduce avoidable mistakes first: tighten decision-making, align product and engineering, and put foundations in place that make a small team dangerous in the right way.

Getting started with performance testing

Performance bugs erode trust quietly until users explode. Three pragmatic steps help you catch slowdowns early: explore real bottlenecks with Sentry, test with production-sized data, and add lightweight API load tests.

Navigating Outages: lessons from recent cloud failures

Outages can strike unexpectedly, impacting businesses and users alike. In this episode of the SaaS Show, hosts Andreas and Sjimi delve into the recent outages experienced by major cloud providers like Amazon and Cloudflare.

The End of “AI-powered”

Of course your product is AI-based. There is no need mention this anymore. Tech loves a fashionable label. Web 2.0 had its moment, then mobile, then the cloud. Do not tell me your product uses AI. Tell me what your product can do that was impossible before AI existed.

What will the state of AI be like by this time next year?

What will the state of AI be like in a year's time? Here are Mike Veerman's predictions of what major things will happen next in AI

Stereotypes: are these the biggest misconceptions about software engineers?

Outdated myths about developers—like “they hate meetings” or “only care about code”—create friction, missed context, and rework. Learn how to build healthier collaboration across engineering and product.

Subscribe