The Dark Side of MACH

MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) architectures are taking the e-commerce world by storm, promising a future of flexible, scalable, and fast-moving systems. But before you jump on board, it’s important to take a closer look at what you might be getting into. In this session, we’ll explore the often overlooked “dark side” of MACH—those hidden challenges that can catch you off guard if your team is coming from a traditional, monolithic background.

Rather than painting MACH as all sunshine and rainbows, we’ll talk openly about the tricky parts: juggling multiple microservices, handling complex data flows, and managing an evolving ecosystem of tools, platforms, and vendors. Drawing on guidance from the MACH Alliance (machalliance.org) and insights inspired by resources like Building Microservices by Sam Newman (O’Reilly, 2015) and Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (IT Revolution, 2019), we’ll discuss how to spot the real needs of your current system, decide if MACH is right for you, and adopt best practices that keep complexity in check.

Join me for a frank, practical conversation about what it really takes to shift from monoliths to MACH. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of how to manage the complexity, upskill your team, and shape a roadmap that builds on what’s essential—without getting lost in the hype.

a talk for people (within or outside the ecommerce domain) to get a reality check about MACH architectures beyond the hype. After this talk they should be able to understand if MACH is for them or not and get a little cookbook for the biggest challenges.

The Echidna Pattern: Scaling Platforms Without Losing Flexibility

Meet the band of mighty dev heros that happily just released their new platform. But their bright future is endangered by the mighty wizards of external dependencies. Their demands for integration and collaboration become more and more a burden for our mighty heros. But in their deepest despair, salvation came in the form of Echidna. This mysterious creature shows our band of heros how they can protect their precious platform from getting blocked and slowed down from integration baggage and how still they can stay open to new parties of collaboration without sacrificing their flexibility and own roadmap. The talk shows how to setup an Echidna architecture and how to abstract integrations via defined APIs and hooks. It also shows some basic rules to consider implementing the latter so that the core system stays flexible and effective without becoming too closed down and hence irrelevant.

Echidna Architecture is a pattern i came up with, helping several customers in keeping their platforms, or SaaS products in general, agile yet flexible to change

Spec Driven AI Development: "Vibe coding" done right (for enterprises and complex projects)

Vibe coding is everywhere in the media...and many of those media predict the "end of software engineering or software engineers"....But we also see daily how vibe coding often fails outside of "experiment" stages because of the lack of clear specifications or validation criteria.
While useful for exploration, this approach often results in
inconsistent quality, integration issues, and governance challenges
in enterprise environments. Spec-driven AI development using the
DSPI workflow establishes a structured path from intent to
deployment, ensuring reproducibility, compliance, and alignment
between business, design, and implementation. I will give an
introduction what DSPI is, how it can be useful in enterprise AI
assisted coding and show with some live examples how code and spec
can be generated with DSPI tooling and AI agents; fully locally or with third party models.

Confidential Computing: The future of data sovereignty

We live in times where data breaches, CLOUD act and regulatory requirements ask for increased sovereignty and protection for our data. Beyond encrypting at rest and in transit, we also can now encrypt data in use. This works by using specialised hardware and so called TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) which can block out completely any nosy provider or data thief. This talk explores how confidential computing isolates workloads at the chip level, ensuring that even cloud providers cannot access protected data. You will gain an overview of its core principles, current adoption patterns, and practical use cases across industries handling sensitive workloads...from confidential VMs, confidential Containers or even enclave specific applications for specialized sensitive tasks.

What tattoos and software projects have in common

In this session, we’ll explore why getting a tattoo and building software aren’t as different as they might seem. Both require vision, trust, and a steady hand, whether it’s ink hitting skin or code hitting production. We’ll look at how great artists and great developers share a respect for careful planning, a willingness to iterate, and the courage to commit. By the end, you’ll see that whether you’re holding a tattoo gun or a keyboard, the path to something remarkable is forged through patience, care, and embracing the unexpected. As a tattooed software guy i know of what i am speaking :)

You Ain't Gonna Need It (Yet): An Ode to Moduliths

the word "Monolith" or "monolithic" has become negatively connoted and the internet is full praising distributed (in form of microservices or even serverless) systems as the ultimate solution to any problem. In this talk i will show you that this is in fact an antipattern calles Cargo Cult Development, and that in many cases a well modularized monolithic design can save you a lot of headaches. I will show why distributed systems can be more complex than the internet tells you and how you can decide on your own, based on facts rather than propaganda, which design is right for your current project.