AI coding test turned to product
The journey how I started to get my feet wet with cursor (again) and how it solved a hyperpersonal software problem for me.
Seasoned Technology Leader. Mentor. Dad.
Hi, I'm Oliver Wehrens.
For over 20 years I shaped Technology & Product in companies ranging from startups to major corporations. I started my career in software engineering and moved to technology leadership in roles like Head of Architecture, CTO and VP Engineering. I transform technology and shape cultural changes in organizations. I am a proponent of the fact that every change in technology, product and organisation triggers a change in the other areas.
Enjoy.
Latest
How Agents Find Their Own Tools: Agentic Resource Discovery
How do agents find capabilities of web sites? Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) is a draft spec that lets any domain advertise its AI tools the same way websites advertise themselves to search engines. Let's explore how this works.
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Using AI and Model Context Protocol to create more usable Jira Tickets
How many Jira tickets have you seen which are just one line of description? Fear no more. Your friendly AI will help you. (More AI slop?)
iOS Development Setup with Cursor AI
How to setup Cursor AI for iOS Development.
The return of product and requirements development. Writing software without being a developer.
I do not know Swift nor iOS Development. Yet, I wrote a fully fledged Podcast Player for iOS in 3 hours.
Running Deepseek 671B Model on a PC locally
You can now run the 671B model of DeepSeek locally thanks to unsloth.
The Pivotal Role of Tech Leadership in Overseeing the Big Picture
What does it mean to take care of the Big Picture? What are your responsibilities?
Reporting on a big waterscrum project
Learn how I managed to report a 100 agile developer company into a big corporate strategic project, how we measured progress and met the deadline.
Fuckup: Goodhart's Law in practice - tie a metric to a bonus
We had good intentions of increasing the quality of the code base. Well ...
Fuckup: Programming Languages and Organizations
How not to deal with programming languages introduced by developers.
Clean code ... should you DRY?
Don't repeat yourself. This is a core principle of programming. Right? Or? Why not?
Why you need a macro architecture
What is a macro architecture and what is important?
Can AI replace me as a consultant?
Can an AI replace my job? What would it take?
Whisper: Nvidia RTX 4090 vs M1Pro with MLX (updated with M2/M3)
How fast is my Whisper Benchmark with the MLX Framework from Apple? Nvidia 4090 / M1 Pro / M2 Ultra / M3
Artifacts for effective alignment
Which artifacts are at least needed for an effective alignment in your organization?
Podcast time
Ivan of dev.env Podcast invite me to talk about my way in the IT industry.
OpenAI Whisper Performance on Nvidia RTX 4090
How fast is OpenAI whisper on a RTX 4090?
Semantic Search with Cosine Similarity
Search through text with semantic search using machine learning.
OpenAI Whisper Benchmark Nvidia Tesla T4 / A100
I ran a benchmark on an Nvidia Tesla T4 / A100 to see how well OpenAI Whisper performs.
OpenAI Whisper on Apple M1
How good runs the C++ implementation of OpenAIs Whisper on Apple Silicon?
What does it take to become a software architect?
I got together with Eberhard Wolff to discuss and answer questions about what it takes to become a Software Architekt on Software Architektur TV.
How hands-on should a CTO be?
Should a CTO code?
Sketch Book Summary: No Estimates
Sketch Book Summary: No Estimates
Four weeks of home office
On March 12th we decided to send everybody into Home office. We were partially already working remotely but we never tried to be 100%. Now we were forced to.
Sketch Book Summary: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
A sketch on the book to remember.
2019
Lots of things have changed for me in 2019. So let’s look back.
Technical Agility
What, why, where & how to react to changes
Wardley Mapping Canvas
A simple Canvas for creating Wardley Maps.
Using Sketch Book Summary (SBS) to remember content what matters to me.
Drawing important things from books keeps my memory fresh.
Sketch Book Summary: Atomic Habits
A summary sketch about the book 'Atomic Habbits'.
CD und DevOps im Expertencheck
Grau ist alle Theorie. Wir haben daher verschiedene Experten zum Thema Continuous Delivery und DevOps befragt – wir wollten wissen, wie ihre Erfahrungen mit den eigenen Teams und Unternehmen verlaufen sind. Oft stellte sich heraus, dass die Technik an sich nicht das größte Problem ist.'.
Warum wir auf DevOps setzen
Die Konkurrenz ist groß, jeder will beim Ausliefern der Software der schnellste sein. Warum wir dabei auf DevOps setzen? Das sind die Argumente.
2017-90 - Random Tech Links
Automating Kubernetes Cluster Operations with Operators The goal is to give end-users a carefree Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) no matter the underlying infrastructure. Most…
Service Discovery For Machines And Humans
My slides from the OOP 2017 conference. - Abstract: Combining Continuous Deployment and a Microservice architecture brings new challenges to develop and operate your platform. A…
Microservices bei der E-POST
Microservices sind in aller Munde, und auf Konferenzen versprechen Migrationsszenarien und technische Details gut besuchte Vorträge. Eine Folie, die fast immer auftaucht, ist eine Feststellung von Melvin Conway aus dem Jahr 1968, die besagt, dass „Organisationen, die Systeme entwerfen, […] auf Entwürfe festgelegt sind, welche die Kommunikationsstrukturen dieser Organisationen abbilden.“ (Conways Law). Das heißt konkret, dass sich die Organisation der Firma und der Teams direkt auf den Code und die Architektur auswirkt.
Der Real-Life-Check
Über Microservices wird momentan viel in Theorie geschrieben und gesprochen. Doch wie sieht es in der wahren Welt dort draußen aus? Wir haben die Autoren dieses Themenschwerpunkts und weitere Experten aus der Branche gefragt, wie ihre Microservices-Erfahrungen aus der Praxis sind.
How is your microservice architecture doing?
It all started when my new boss stepped into my door and asked me if I had a clue how our system was working. In an ideal world we would have teams and developers who work on a…
Entwicklung verteilter Systeme - Herausforderungen nicht nur an die Architektur
This is my talk about Development of distributed systems - challenges not only for the architecture . You guessed it, it is in german. I gave this talk at BedCon 2015 and I will…
Wider den Monolith - Am Ende wird alles gut
My WJax 2014 talk in german. Wider den Monolith - Am Ende wird alles gut. My first talk with lots of pictures. The talk was recorded. As soon as I know the url I will post it here…
Migrating a monolith
If you start, a monolith is much easier to begin with. Everything is in one place, it's fast and all team members understand the code. If you plan your application from the start…
If you don't fight it you end up with a monolith
You planned your software. You talked to your business owners. As soon as you saw a new use case which should be implemented, you modularized it. You did everything right. And then…
A Monolith could be good for you
Everybody says monolithic applications are bad. I usually hear things like: - Tiny changes need full redeployment (maybe even with downtime) - Limited agility - Easy to get a big…
How you might know that you have a monolith
You start your green field project and keep working on it. It grows and grows and grows. You feel comfortable with it and it could not be better. Because more needs to be done/the…
How failing tests can be green
Imagine this conversation: Friend : "We have an integration system where we deploy every two weeks all commits and run hundreds of end to end tests on it." Me : "And if everything…
Getting Faster
My Continuous Lifecycle 2013 talk. How we got faster at deploying our software.
Mit Puppet und RPM
„It works on my machine“ hat sicher jeder schon einmal gehört. In der Entwicklung verhält sich die Software wie erwartet. Bis diese in der Produktion ist, dauert es lange. Einmal live, treten dann unerwartete Fehler auf, während die Softwareentwicklung längst an einer ganz anderen Stelle ist. Wie kann dieser Spagat umgangen werden? Dieser Artikel reflektiert, wie wir mit diesem Problem auf Basis einer paketorientierten Deployment Pipeline umgehen.
Doing a Sprint Review with a Review Fair
I'm working in an organization where we do synchronized sprints between all teams. This means every two weeks all meeting rooms are booked for retrospectives and sprint plannings.…
Using KVM and Virt-Manager via XQuartz on MacOSX (and solving the keymapping trouble)
In the last couple of months I got to play around with virtualization at work. Doing automated delivery pipleines and provisiong via puppet I decided it's time to get my hands even…
Getting started with veewee and vagrant
What do you need to do to get a fully automated kickstart of a virtual machine on your local development platform running? Not much it turns out. There are some tricks to get…
From Development to Production
My BedCon 2013 talk. Covering commiting code, packaging,testing, deployment and organisational changes.
Do not use Javadoc
Javadoc is here to help. To understand what the code does and how it works? Right? I don't think so. I confuses the heck out of me in most cases.
Javascript testing for Java projects
I'm a Java Programmer. I do mostly web projects. There is a tendency to move away from server side frameworks towards Javascript (+mvc) and rest services. This now involves me in…
Realtime Push Events zum Browser
WebSockets sind in aller Munde, im Java Magazin sind sie nun sogar Titelthema. Aber es geht auch einfacher: Wer Echtzeit-Events zum Browser schicken will, kann es sich leicht machen. Dieser Artikel zeigt, wie.
Cucumber-jvm for Java
In an earlier article I compared cucumber (with Cuke4Duke) and Concordion. It was very cumbersome due to the ruby/jruby jvm chain. Behold - the new cucumber-jvm was released. So…
One assert per test, really
Recently I was debugging my code and I could not see why my test was failing. It took me about 20 minutes to see that I violated one rule I try to follow. One assert per test .…
Spring 3 MVC, Ajax and jQuery Magic (or better: simplicity)
I'm playing around with some web frameworks lately and to see what's in store with Spring 3 MVC (never did too much with it) I gave it a try to see how it handles Ajax. According…
Busy Programmers Guide on where to buy eBooks
Every Programmer needs to read books. Usually you would get some packages from Amazon (or your favorite retailer) and read through them. Now with devices like the Kindle and iPad…
How to detect if your server is down when making jQuery Ajax calls
If you developed an ajax rich web application , maybe even a single page interface, you want to make sure that the user gets notified if the server is not reachable anymore. This…
Lightweight Web Prototyping for the Framework loving (Java) Developer
A couple of month ago I had an idea for a small web app. But what does it take to do it ? Do you start with the back end or the front end (read server or client side) ? Typically I…
How we switched from Subversion to Git
So I heard about these strange distributed version control system s like over a year ago. I used it in my own little projects and everything went smoothly and I really liked it.…
5 code metrics you need to watch
Developing software ain't easy. How do you know how you are doing ? You could start collecting metrics about your code. These can give you some indication how maintainable and…
Name your objects right
Whenever you create an object you have to find a meaningful name. While renaming later in modern IDE's is no problem at all you should not pick the first name which comes to your…
One year of blogging
One year ago I started to blog again. Time for a little recap. Why did I do it ? I use this blog to write down my own thoughts about software and development. This is for my own…
What's your preferred development infrastructure stack?
In Response to Matt Raible's question about my preferred development stack. Source control In my own development project I switched to Git some time ago. I was using svn and before…
Using Selenium2 for web testing (and not Selenium IDE)
Selenium IDE Selenium is well know for automatic testing web pages. It does support many browsers, operating systems and languages . A Selenium IDE exists to aid you creating…
Story based daily stand-up meeting
We are agile. We do Scrum. We do daily Stand-ups. A couple of weeks ago we changed our daily stand-up meeting. Our Scrum master came up with the idea to not go around the whole…
Integrate early, integrate often
You are doing scrum, your story is big, you really don't know much about it and the feature does not get implemented in time. Sounds familiar ? I had this a couple of times. What…
Concordion vs. Cucumber and Java based Acceptance Testing
If you want your Business Analyst to provide some acceptance tests for your implementation it would be best to make sure you get it in some form your tests can read. That way you…
Test JBoss Rules 5 (or Drools) with TestNG
We have been using our own flavor of Fit for Rules (which is build on top of fit ) for about 1 1/2 years now to test our business logic written in JBoss Rules 5 . It's relatively…
How pair programming can help you to get into Test Driven Development
At my current job management buys into Test driven development. It slowly starts to become our primary development style. Some advantages of TDD for me are: Focus on problem…
4 ways to test your code
Whenever you write some code you better make sure you have it covered by some tests. There are different possibilities on how to achieve this (and you might want to use all of…
How to get your developers to pay more attention to the burn down chart (and have fun)
For the last couple of month our scrum master always drew our daily burn down chart. Nice and fine and it always happened automagically. It came to the point that we (the…
Two upgrades to cut down development time
No matter how good a developer is, with two hardware upgrades you can speed up most machines and cut down development time for everybody. Your big fat IDE Depending what you use to…
Getting started with JSF 2 (and Maven)
I use Apache Trinidad at work and since JSF 2 is now final I decided to play with it a bit. Of course this is going to be the classic Hello World example (as there are many other…
Update on Quant TestTester
Here is a small update on my little fun project. I released version 0.2 of quant. Now it will recognize all TestNG annotations which do not have a TestNG group (like @BeforeMethod,…
Quant - Check your Tests
Did you ever wondered if all tests your team wrote are really running ? How many disabled tests does your code base have? How many public void methods do not have a @Test…
Jetbrains released a Google App Engine plugin for IntelliJ
Jetbrains released a Google App Engine plugin for their IntelliJ IDE. I did not see any announcement about this at all. You will have a new option when creating a new project.…
IntelliJ Idea Plugin Property Sorter updated
I'm pretty busy at work right now but I could find some time to add one more feature to my little property sorter plugin for IntelliJ Idea. Comments above property entries will now…
How to test Spring Webflow 2 (with parent flows)
In the last couple of month I was writing some flows using Spring Webflow 2. I knew that I (in theory) I could test them but I never did. The overall documentation of Webflow 2 is…
Getting the Browsers GeoLocation with HTML 5
Until now it was almost impossible to get the GeoLocation of a user browsing your site. You could try to use several services to more or less guess the current position. Most of…
A Quick Look at Google App Engine for Java
At Campfire One Google announced their App Engine for Java (this was in the rumor mill for a couple of days already). The first 10,000 developers would get an early look at App…
Coloring your IDE
Your IDE does a great job in helping you to program. This includes advanced features like Refactoring, Code completion and support for nifty frameworks. But it can do much more.…
IE7 caches rendered elements?
I'm tasked with some css tweaking to our current product. We need to implement a 'Print Preview' screen so the customer can see how this looks before printing. Css supports exactly…
Using TestNG with DataProviders to cover more test cases
A couple of days ago I had the case that I needed to test a method with different parameters. I ended up writing a couple of test methods differing only in passing various…
How to refactor Spring Webflow variables in your JSF pages with IntelliJ IDEA
We are using JSF, Facelets and Spring Webflow in the product I'm currently working on. What bugged me for some time already was that when we started to refactor the domain and the…
Updated Scrum Board Cheat Sheet with Story Owner
So just in the last sprint we (re) discovered that we need an owner of each story . A person who makes sure things are going smoothly and takes care that everything is done in a…
SOLID Development Principles In Motivational Pictures (enhanced)
I found SOLID Development Principles In Motivational Pictures a couple of days ago. I put one of them up in the restroom. So it turned out some clever colleague enhanced the SRP…
Why our current Sprint commitment will fail
We do have our Sprint Review tomorrow. We will not meet our commitment. Bummer. What happened? After the planning we did the breakdown of almost all stories. We had 5 Stories and…
Three reasons why you don't want to use a Spring context in unit tests
You use Spring in your application everywhere. You love it. Everything gets injected and is configured by Spring. Great. Why not use the same technology to wire up your tests? The…
Sorting your properties files in IntelliJ Idea
I do work with language property files pretty much every day (since I'm the GUI guy in the team). The files are updated on different branches copied up to the trunk and merged down…
The ScrumBoard Cheat Sheet
In the last couple of month we continuously improved our scrum task board. After a sprint planning we usually do a story breakdown into tasks. All tasks for one story get ordered…
Extreme visibility in an agile environment
What is Extreme visibility? Extreme visibility is all about providing information about the code to every team in near real time. We show several metrics such as complexity of the…
My MacBook Pro loves 4 GB
I upgraded my MacBook Pro last week to 4 GB of RAM (up from 2GB). It's cheap (about 50 Euros) and it really makes a difference. I can give IntelliJ IDEA 1GB Xmx without any…
IntelliJ IDEA Rulezzz with code completion
Today I got an interesting ctrl+space code completion in IDEA 8.1. Easteregg anyone ? :)
IntelliJ IDEA 8.1
I do love IntelliJ IDEA but the 8.0 release had some issues with indexing and compiler caches. Version 8.1 is out and addresses these issues (among other things, e.g. git support).…
Behavior driven development with EasyB (and vs. TestNG)
I heard about BDD a couple of months ago and did not really pay attention. Just some weeks ago I thought that maybe I could improve our test and/or documentation. So I decided to…
Starting again
After about a year of not blogging, I'm getting back to it. I have still some infrastructure work to do but it's coming. Just wait a little bit more.