Over the last couple of years, several acquaintances approached me for help with an issue they had with their phone. Each time the phone ran some kind of customized Android. Sometimes it was heavily modified. Compared to stock Android the modifications made the user experience worse. That left me puzzled. Why do companies put so much effort into features that end up deteriorating the product?

They don’t do it intentionally - at least I’d hope - but why does that happen? I think I have an answer: They become too disconnected from their users.

For a while now we’ve experimented with asynchronous planning poker. Here I want to share how it works and why we started using it instead of traditional synchronous planning poker.

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.

A writeup of how I’ve setup Neovim for Java development

Here is a short guide how to install steamlink on a Raspberry PI running Arch Linux ARM.

I’ve had a draft called “Is scrum the best we can do” lying around for months and the chance to finish it is tiny. So I decided to extract parts of it: Some thoughts on whether sprint commitments are beneficial or not.

TL;DR: Maybe, it depends.

This is a short introduction on how to apply a bit of performance theory in the context of tuning insert throughput performance in CrateDB.

Ask a question regarding the performance characteristic of some piece of code on the Internet and you’ll end up reading an answer along the lines of “premature optimization is the root of all evil”.

I’m starting to get sick of reading those answers. Optimizations aren’t evil.

Or how Crate uses Elasticsearch.

Most people who know Elasticsearch think of it as a search engine, and they’re probably correct. But we at Crate think about it a bit differently and use it as a framework.

In this post I’ll try to explain how that works.

In this post I’ll describe how to set up the audio system that has been doing its work happily in my living room for about a year now.