Blog

On 23.01.2026 (08:30 – 10:30 PM Berlin time) I held my talk „Thoughts on (Modern?) Software Development – Observations From a 21-Year Journey” at the Calgary Software Crafters and JUG Seattle Meetups (remote and in English).

The talk’s sources can be found here, the Meetup event page here:

https://www.meetup.com/calgary-software-crafters/events/312385143

UPDATE: JUG Seattle was so kind to cross-post the talk to its members, see here.

The talk has been recorded and will be available on YouTube soon (pending).

During the talk and in the ensuing discussion some additional sources were mentioned:

• Alex’s featured hashtags (books)
• Alex’s guide to his Mastodon hashtags
• Alex’s reader
• Richard Sheridan “Joy, Inc.“
  —> How does a company look like, that has Kent Beck’s XP in its DNA and where „joy at work“ is a central idea?
• Robert C. Martin in “Clean Agile”: The XP “Circle Of Life”
• John Allspaw: „How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day”
• Carl Sagan: Cosmos (start here, then watch this)
• Peter Block: „The Answer to How Is Yes”
• Susan Goldsworthy at the Inner Development Goals Summit 2025
• Ian McGilchrist: „The Master and his Emmisary”
• Vox.com: „Flood the zone with s***: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy“
• The Anatomy of AI: https://anatomyof.ai
  —> How is AI „created“ before it is delivered to the „customer”?
• Last but not least:
  • The link to all other sources I did mention in the „Thoughts“-related discussions since 2024

In case I did forget anything that you miss here, please get in touch.

Thank you very much for that extended and great discussion!

On 24.11.2025 I held my talk „Thoughts on (Modern?) Software Development – Observations From a 20-Year Journey” at the JUG Switzerland in Zurich (in person and in English).

The talk’s sources can be found here, the Meetup event page can be found here:

https://www.jug.ch/html/events/2025/modern-software-development.html

The event location was:

PH Zürich, Lagerstrasse 2, 8090 Zürich
Building LAB, Room H014

Travel instructions: https://phzh.ch/en/About-us/Campus-PH-Zurich/Location

During the talk and in the ensuing discussion some additional sources were mentioned:

• Toot: „If your management model assumes your employees can’t be trusted, you are in big trouble. If it also assumes that the future is predictable, you are in even bigger trouble.“
• Toot: „Smart home enthusiast vs. software developer“
• Talk by „Richard Sheridan“ about his book „Joy, Inc.“ + my thread related to the book
• John Allspaw: „How your systems keep running day after day”
• Robert C. Martin in „Clean Agile“: The XP „Circle Of Life“
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „Thoughts on AI and Software Development“ (very good analysis about the current state of AI in the year 2025)
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „Solving the Wrong Problem“
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „AI and the Ironies of Automation – Part 1″
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „Simplify“ + „The Continuous Amnesia Issue“ + more
• Jonathan Blow: „Preventing the Collapse of Civilization“
• Baldur Bjarnason: „The Intelligence Illusion“
• Baldur Bjarnason: „Out of the Software Crisis“
• Kent Beck: „Extreme Programming Explained”
• Gunter Dueck’s re:publica 2015 talk on the topic of „Swarm Stupidity“ (german)
• Donella Meadows: „Thinking in Systems”
• Roger McNamee: „Zucked”
• Nicole Perlroth: „This is how they tell me the world ends“ (great book with supposedly bad title, about what „attack surface“ in IT really means)

On 24.11.2025 I held my talk „Thoughts on (Modern?) Software Development – Observations From a 20-Year Journey” at the JUG Bremen/Oldenburg in CTS Eventim AG & Co. KGaA’s Bremen office facilities (in person and in German).

The talk’s sources can be found here, the Meetup event page can be found here:

https://www.meetup.com/jugbremen/events/311717603

The event location was:

Contrescarpe 75A · Bremen

Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query=53.07992%2C%208.810928

During the talk and in the ensuing discussion some additional sources were mentioned:

• Toot: „IT resiliency in one picture”
• Toot: „If your management model assumes your employees can’t be trusted, you are in big trouble. If it also assumes that the future is predictable, you are in even bigger trouble.“
• Toot: „Smart home enthusiast vs. software developer”
• Third Wave: “Wohin steuert die Tech-Branche?“ (very interesting read in relation to “AI before AI became really big”)
• Talk by „Richard Sheridan“ related to „Joy, Inc.“ + thread about the book
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „Thoughts on AI and Software Development“ (very good analysis about the state of things in AI in the year of 2025)
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „Solving the Wrong Problem”
• Uwe Friedrichsen: „AI and the Ironies of Automation – Part 1″
• Uwe Friedrichsen: “Simplify” + “The Continuous Amnesia Issue” + more
• Jonathan Blow: „Preventing the Collapse of Civilization”
• Michael Lewis: „The Undoing Project“
• Baldur Bjarnason: „The Intelligence Illusion“
• Baldur Bjarnason: „Out of the Software Crisis“
• Gunter Dueck’s re:publica 2015 talk about „Swarm Stupidity“
• Charles Duhigg: „The Power Of Habit“
• Yuval Noah Harari: „Nexus“ and his TED interview
• The Anatomy of AI: https://anatomyof.ai/
• Frédéric Laloux: „Reinventing Organizations visuell“
• Joana Breidenbach & Bettina Rollow: „New Work Needs Inner Work”
• Spiral Dynamics: „IMU’s integral map”
• Richard Clarke’s “Cyberwar” (dating back to 2010)
• Nicholas Carr: „The Shallows”
• Cathy O’Neill: „Weapons of Math Destruction”