The art of quitting

Quitting. For most people this has a sound of failure and negativity, but in my talk i want to show why quitting is much more than this. In fact it is an essential tool for any founder, manager, engineer or poker player. I will show what makes quitting so hard and how we can mitigate the factors that let us quit too early or too late. Furthermore i will demonstrate how we can optimize our decisions if and/or when to quit at the right time. Quitting is an art. So let's practise it.

Why software architecture matters more than ever - even in the age of vibe coding

In this session i will talk about why, despite vibe coding and AI agents and code all the things with AI, a good software architecture matters more than ever. I will show how a good software architecture can drastically help your coding agents to select the right components for their context window, how this saves tokens and annoying "WTF Claude....i did not want this" moments. I will give some practical insights how to structure your projects so that an AI agent can truly be helpful and reduce the AI slop that you then have to manually correct during uncool night-sessions or weekends.

How we build an airport with AI

In this session i will talk about how we planned (and still plan) a whole airport in South East Asia in under 1 year.with all the bells and whistles you can imagine for a 5* airfield location...and how AI is helping us doing so...what we learned works and what does not, where we thought AI is easy to apply and got taught a lesson...and why often we cursed the famous "Human in the Loop" :D ..I will tell anecdotes and stories from our journey, where we are and where we (at least plan) to go...and how in the end the puzzle should look like

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.

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.