Killing Sacred Cows: How ShapeUp’s no-estimates policy outperforms Scrum’s meeting debt

In the world of distributed systems, they say “Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance. You can only ever get two – this is the CAP theorem”. In product engineering, we face a similar trilemma: in time, in scope, in budget. What's the smartest choice? Let's assume we pick in time and budget, stop feature creep, end endless meeting cycles, and revolutionize how we approach development.

Enter ShapeUp, a methodology from Basecamp I was introduced to in a bootstrapped US startup, where it unblocked our small team and enabled us to ship meaningful features again. A few years later I brought ShapeUp to a German VC-backed unicorn in the renewable energy sector. These environments couldn't be more different, yet ShapeUp was the magic wand that supercharged both engineering teams. This isn't about project management; it's about empowering engineers to ship value consistently.

Learn how we ditched Scrum ceremonies for focused, impactful development cycles. Discover how ShapeUp transforms software engineers into product engineers, fostering ownership and innovation. The secret sauce: we'll explore how cool-downs maintain velocity without sacrificing quality.

Breaking the Grind: Crafting Your Ideal Software Engineering Career Build

Explore the world of software engineering skills through the lens of role-playing games to find the most effective builds for advancing your career. This talk metaphorically approaches (MMO)RPG skill trees by looking at different career paths in software engineering, unlocking new skills, and leveling up existing ones to branch out into new areas of expertise. We'll examine a variety of paths — including programming paradigms, software delivery, organizational development, and team management. LFG for adventure, and uncover the vast possibilities of building a career as a software engineer!

Flour Water Salt Elixir: The Fundamentals of Artisanal Hardware Hacking

What’s more fun than telling computers what to do? Combining programming with other activities you love! As a bread lover and amateur baker, that was hitting the sweet spot in sourdough fermentation using a Raspberry PI, sensors, and some 3D printing.
In this talk, you’ll learn about the fundamentals of interacting with the physical world from Elixir using the Nerves framework. You’ll hear fun stories about implementing bewitched protocols to get data out of sensors, and along the way we’ll talk about the basics of naturally-leavened bread. Hopefully you’ll walk away inspired to hack your hobby!

Everything about DNS you never dared to ask!

DNS is 37 years old, still today, one of the pillars of the modern Internet. Everything you do from deploying your app to twitter uses it. Yet, it's a black box for many of us. This talk covers the basics from resolvers to ICANN and the IETF we will a bird view and zoom into the exciting details.

This talk was born from an open space session I did at a local conference. I learned that it's a topic often touched on, but people often have many questions about it. The talk was always well received as it explained the fundamental concepts of the Internet and privacy of metadata in DNS and showed that it'd not been solved yet, while we are still discussing various ways with their pros and cons.

Explaining a concept people often feel they should already know about, plus the discussion of DNS privacy, always led to great feedback from the audience.

I started at a DNS management company about five years ago and had to learn a lot of this myself from the ground up.