Building the Agentic R&D Organization
CASE, Berlin. A condensed version of the alphalist Dev Bootcamp.
Back to speaking
Talks, past and upcoming
More than forty talks since 2016, plus podcasts and articles. The dates still ahead come first, then everything that still has a video, slides, or a link. Each talk started as something that was bugging me at work.
Talk or keynote Podcast, article or interview
- 1
- Talk: Microservices: Hype or Already Reality?
- 3
- Talk: Going Reactive: An Introduction to Reactive Programming
- Talk: Open Ecosystems and Distributed Architectures
- Talk: Zap the Duck and the API Client Speaks
- 4
- Talk: Persistence with the Head in the Cloud
- Keynote: All About Fashion or What? On the Challenge of Making a Bear Stand on its Legs
- Talk: Self-Contained Systems: More Than Just an Ordered Set of Microservices?
- Talk: Keine Zeit
- 2
- Talk: Why Quarkus.io is Better Than Spring
- Talk: ETL 2.0: Product Data Processing from Batch to Event Driven
- 1
- Talk: Through the Flower: From Bouquet to Roller Coaster
- 8
- Article: Responsible Architecture
- Interview: How BLUME 2000's CIO Organizes Web Architecture Beyond Microservices
- Article: IT Speed Takes Priority Over Efficiency
- Talk: Single-Page Applications are Legacy, We Need Innovation!
- Interview: Legacy&Innovation #16: the interview
- Talk: Documentation is Dead, Long Live Documentation!
- Talk: Close Development Despite Home Office: How BLUME 2000 Renewed its Web Shop with Mob Programming
- Talk: Speed Without the Microservice Hype: How BLUME 2000 Performs with Good Old HTML and Macro Services
- 5
- Talk: What It Takes to Be Fast: A Tale About Responsibility
- Talk: Loose Coupling in Frontend with Hotwire, or Death to SPAs
- Talk: Functional Architecture with Kotlin
- Podcast: Different — podcast interview
- Podcast: Agile through "Accelerate"
- 5
- Talk: The Big Five for Developing Software Fast for a Long Time
- Talk: Efficiency Misconceptions: How to Build an Antifragile IT Department
- Talk: Verticalization: Team Topologies, Building SCS Along the Business Model Canvas
- Talk: Loose Coupling in Frontend with Hotwire, or Down with SPAs
- Talk: DDD Projects Benefit from Functional Architecture
- 2
- Talk: From Search Results to Insights: Statista's GenerativeAI Journey
- Talk: Why HTMX is Crushing React, Vue & Svelte
- 7
- Podcast: Agentic Software Engineering
- Talk: When AI Becomes the Engineer
- Talk: Vibe-Coding Is Killing Your AI Productivity
- Talk: No More Broken Handoffs between Product & Engineering
- Talk: How to Safely Run Your Agent in YOLO Mode
- Talk: From Search Results to Insights: Learnings from Statista's GenerativeAI Journey
- Talk: Data Products & Data Contracts: Migration von Legacy zu Innovation
- 17
- Podcast: Fix the software factory
- Podcast: Building Your Software Factory
- Podcast: Rethink Engineering, with Patrick Debois
- Podcast: Rethink Engineering, with Sam Newman
- Podcast: Mit Claude und Codex Software auf Steroiden entwickeln
- Podcast: Rethink Engineering, with Steve Yegge
- Talk: Stop Building Features. Build the Factory That Builds Them.
- Talk: Why Vibe-Coding Fails (And How to Fix It)
- Podcast: Warum Agentic Engineering alles ändert
- Talk: alphalist CTO Bootcamp
- Talk: Stop Building Features. Build the Factory That Builds Them.
- Talk: Pioneers Club
- Talk: Agentic Coding... jenseits des Coding!
- Talk: Stop Building Features. Build the Factory That Builds Them.
- Podcast: Bridging the Skills Gap: Insights from Agentic Coding Training
- Talk: Agents Across the SDLC: From Refinement to Retro
- Talk: Why Vibe-Coding Fails (And How to Fix It)
2025–2027 · Agentic engineering
Building the Dark Factory: When Agents Run the Whole SDLC
OOP, Munich.
LangChain x hackers&wizards Hackathon
AI Hackathon Nights Hamburg #01: building with agent harnesses.
alphalist Dev Bootcamp
Berlin. Curriculum lead for a day of agentic engineering for developers.
Software Factories: Engineering on Autopilot
Digitale Leute Summit, Cologne.
code.talks 2026
Hamburg. I chair the programme of the conference I have spoken at most.
Fix the software factory
Guest on The Next Commit.
Building Your Software Factory
Guest on Luca Rossi's Refactoring Podcast: why product and engineering roles are merging, and where the time agents save should go.
Rethink Engineering, with Patrick Debois
An episode of the podcast I host with re:cinq.
Rethink Engineering, with Sam Newman
An episode of the podcast I host with re:cinq.
Mit Claude und Codex Software auf Steroiden entwickeln
Guest on Richard Seidl's podcast, in German.
Rethink Engineering, with Steve Yegge
An episode of the podcast I host with re:cinq.
Stop Building Features. Build the Factory That Builds Them.
KI Park Summer Event, Berlin.
Why Vibe-Coding Fails (And How to Fix It)
OOP Focus Webinar, online.
Warum Agentic Engineering alles ändert
Guest on Richard Seidl's podcast, in German.
alphalist CTO Bootcamp
Berlin.
Stop Building Features. Build the Factory That Builds Them.
With Gero Duppel, Digitale Leute Meetup, Cologne.
Pioneers Club
Digital Gym, Bielefeld.
Agentic Coding... jenseits des Coding!
With Fabian Nilius (inoio), JUG Hamburg, in German.
Stop Building Features. Build the Factory That Builds Them.
With Leo Peters, agentic.hamburg conf, Hamburg.
Bridging the Skills Gap: Insights from Agentic Coding Training
Guest on Rethink Engineering, then hosted by Daniel Jones. I took over as host in 2026.
Agents Across the SDLC: From Refinement to Retro
AI Agents Montreal, online.
Why Vibe-Coding Fails (And How to Fix It)
OOP, Munich.
CASE 2026
Berlin.
Agentic Software Engineering
Guest on Conversations about Software Engineering.
When AI Becomes the Engineer
Digitale Leute Summit, Cologne.
Vibe-Coding Is Killing Your AI Productivity
code.talks, Hamburg.
No More Broken Handoffs between Product & Engineering
With Zamina Ahmad, code.talks, Hamburg.
How to Safely Run Your Agent in YOLO Mode
AI Driven Development Day, Unlearn.
From Search Results to Insights: Learnings from Statista's GenerativeAI Journey
OOP, Munich. The Statista talk, given as CTO of TalentFormation.
Data Products & Data Contracts: Migration von Legacy zu Innovation
intersoft techCamp, in German.
2024 · AI-assisted development
From Search Results to Insights: Statista's GenerativeAI Journey
Statista built ResearchAI to turn long lists of search results into short, well-sourced answers. The talk walks through that journey: retrieval-augmented generation over their own data, the cost and latency of each request, how hard it is to staff a team for a technology this new, and why the model still hallucinates even when the accurate data is right there.
Why HTMX is Crushing React, Vue & Svelte
HTMX is a different way to build web applications. No JSON or GraphQL, no serialization, no virtual DOM, no separate frontend deployment. You write HTML and pick whatever typed backend language you like. The talk builds an e-commerce shop with Kotlin, Spring Boot, and plain Tailwind to show what that looks like in practice.
2020–2023 · Architecture and how teams work
The Big Five for Developing Software Fast for a Long Time
Efficiency Misconceptions: How to Build an Antifragile IT Department
Efficiency is one of the most misused words in IT. Say it and people immediately hear cost-cutting: fewer resources, less overhead, more automation. That reading was always too narrow, and in a world shaken by one crisis after another it stopped being enough. The talk is about building an IT department that gets stronger under stress, not just cheaper.
Verticalization: Team Topologies, Building SCS Along the Business Model Canvas
The TalentFormation Network rebuilds companies with the three-horizon model, and verticalization is the workhorse for the first horizon: getting a company onto a solid base before it extends its business model. In practice that means building product and technology organizations along the lines of Team Topologies, with Self-Contained Systems mapped to the Business Model Canvas. All models are wrong, some are useful. Christoph and I explain which ones we combined and why.
Loose Coupling in Frontend with Hotwire, or Down with SPAs
There is no way around Single-Page Applications today. React, Angular, Vue, pick one, the standard answer for frontend architecture is a SPA. But the SPA idea is older than it looks. AngularJS shipped it broadly a decade ago. Hotwire takes a different route: clean architectures on low-level web standards, the UX you expect from a SPA, and loose coupling between teams, which is what keeps a frontend scalable.
DDD Projects Benefit from Functional Architecture
Functional programmers tend to say "FP first". That purist stance does not fit the many real projects that are object-oriented and built on DDD, which is a shame, because those projects have plenty to gain from functional techniques. The talk follows a collaboration between BLUME 2000, firmly in OO hands, and Active Group, all FP purists, on a hexagonal DDD architecture in Kotlin: validation with applicative functors, free monads to separate the domain from the ports, and functional dependency injection.
What It Takes to Be Fast: A Tale About Responsibility
Every company wants to be fast: fast into a new market, fast to ship a feature, fast to build a product. Time to market is the fuel for the build-measure-learn cycle, and running that cycle faster than your competitors is a real advantage. Wanting it is the easy part. The talk is about how you actually get there, and it comes down to independence and responsibility.
Loose Coupling in Frontend with Hotwire, or Death to SPAs
There is no way around Single-Page Applications today. React, Angular, Vue, pick one, the standard answer for frontend architecture is a SPA. But the SPA idea is older than it looks. AngularJS shipped it broadly a decade ago. Hotwire takes a different route: clean architectures on low-level web standards, the UX you expect from a SPA, and loose coupling between teams, which is what keeps a frontend scalable.
Functional Architecture with Kotlin
Kotlin advertises functional programming support, but in practice you have to reach for it deliberately. It is still easier than Java. A few of those techniques pay off when you build a clean architecture: reliable data organization and validation, flexible dependency injection with monads. They complement a DDD project well, and you can add them after the fact. The talk shows where functional programming earns its place in Kotlin.
Different — podcast interview
How do you create ideal working conditions in tech organizations, conditions that also give the organization a real competitive advantage?
Agile through "Accelerate"
"Accelerate" gives CIOs a framework for implementing agile practices in a way that delivers measurable business success. As CIO of BLUME 2000, I did exactly that, and talk through the change process: the dos and don'ts, and practical tips for implementation.
Responsible Architecture
Speed, effectiveness, and joy through entrepreneurial responsibility.
How BLUME 2000's CIO Organizes Web Architecture Beyond Microservices
Microservices are a big trend. But they get in the way of speed, and that is why something completely different is done at BLUME 2000: a full separation of business logic, organization, and finally technology. The interview describes how that works, alongside the talk on speed without microservices.
IT Speed Takes Priority Over Efficiency
The IT department of online retailer BLUME 2000 is meant to deliver new features faster. To achieve this, the traditional technical departments were reorganized into domain-specific teams and the IT landscape was split along domain lines.
Single-Page Applications are Legacy, We Need Innovation!
There is no way around Single-Page Applications today. React, Angular, Vue, pick one, the standard answer for frontend architecture is a SPA. But the SPA idea is older than it looks. AngularJS shipped it a decade ago. The talk goes back to the frontend problems that led to SPAs in the first place, and asks whether we have better answers to those problems now.
Legacy&Innovation #16: the interview
A short interview with Stephan Pirnbaum at the intersoft meetup, after the talk on single-page applications.
Documentation is Dead, Long Live Documentation!
Documentation matters at every company size. Developers still avoid it, because nobody wants to log into a second bloated tool to write it. So why not make docs feel more like writing code? Several markdown and asciidoc frameworks are open to developers and non-technical people alike, and they take a lot of friction out of the process. The talk tells our docs story: picking a framework and hosting it on GitLab Pages.
Close Development Despite Home Office: How BLUME 2000 Renewed its Web Shop with Mob Programming
In the middle of the pandemic, BLUME 2000 started rebuilding its e-commerce platform. Remote mob programming and new ways of sharing knowledge let several teams ship the MVP in a few months. The talk covers the project setup, how iteratec supported the teams, the technology, and what we learned from one of Hamburg's more interesting e-commerce projects that year.
Speed Without the Microservice Hype: How BLUME 2000 Performs with Good Old HTML and Macro Services
Plenty of companies jumped into microservices and single-page applications as if they solved everything, and ended up slowed down by infrastructure that got more complex instead of less. The talk shows the other route: good old HTML techniques, carefully cut macro services, and solid DevOps practices. The real point is that speed shows up when leadership, knowledge, organization, and technology pull in the same direction.
Through the Flower: From Bouquet to Roller Coaster
Omnichannel, digital business, verticalization, agile, apps. For a small or mid-sized company, the list alone is overwhelming. The talk is about how a company that size keeps pace with the big players, and now and then gets ahead of them.
2018–2019 · Microservices and APIs
Why Quarkus.io is Better Than Spring
Microservices and Spring Boot have become hard to separate. But Spring comes from a time of monoliths hosted on big on-premise servers, and a lot of its internals still carry that era with them. Serverless and DevOps change the requirements. Quarkus.io shows how lean and fast a web framework can be when it is designed for the way we work now. The talk sets up a few Quarkus services together and deploys them on Kubernetes.
ETL 2.0: Product Data Processing from Batch to Event Driven
Breuninger processed its product data with classic batch jobs for years. As business demands grew, batch stopped keeping up, so we rebuilt the pipeline around an event-driven design. The talk walks through that new pipeline with its trade-offs, built on Java 11, Kafka, MongoDB, and Atom feeds over HTTP and JSON.
Persistence with the Head in the Cloud
All About Fashion or What? On the Challenge of Making a Bear Stand on its Legs
Verticalization, omnichannel, digital business, agile, apps, and in the middle of it a 136-year-old retailer you would not expect to find there. Breuninger is known for exquisite clothing, not for IT. In this keynote Katja Burkert, Head of Software Engineering, and I talk about the challenges and opportunities of vertical architecture, what makes code worth caring about, and why verticalization is crucial in software architecture.
Self-Contained Systems: More Than Just an Ordered Set of Microservices?
Microservices are everywhere, and Self-Contained Systems have been gaining ground too. So how do the two concepts differ? Can you combine them sensibly, or are there contradictions and pitfalls to watch for? The talk answers that, and shows how both concepts play out in Breuninger's multi-channel platform.
Keine Zeit
An eight-minute talk at the Digitalfieber Fachtag by neuland, in German.
2016–2017 · Reactive programming and early APIs
Going Reactive: An Introduction to Reactive Programming
The market is pushing online shops from one monolith toward a connected system of many microservices, all talking through interfaces. Clients inside and outside the shop, apps, IoT devices, phones, all expect real-time data. The iterative programming style we have been using runs into walls here. The talk digs into those problems, introduces reactive programming, and ends with code that streams data from database to frontend with Rx.
Open Ecosystems and Distributed Architectures
The market is pushing e-commerce from a closed shop toward an open ecosystem, and that means exposing functionality through an external API so native apps, social media, IoT devices, physical retail, and outside websites can all connect. The talk presents Breuninger's distributed microservice architecture, the motivation behind it, the practical lessons, and how we approached both public and internal APIs.
Zap the Duck and the API Client Speaks
The market is pushing otto.de from a closed shop toward an open ecosystem, which means publishing shop functionality through an API so native apps, social media, IoT devices, and outside websites can all connect. The talk covers otto.de's microservice architecture and our external API, built with Java, Spring Security, and OAuth2, the challenges of distributed architectures, and a live demo of how quickly someone can build a surprising use case on top of the API.
Microservices: Hype or Already Reality?
In e-commerce the motto is more agile, faster, more innovative, and staying successful means questioning your business model regularly. otto.de is one of Germany's largest e-commerce platforms. It runs on a strict, vertically cut shared-nothing architecture, and to avoid sliding back into the problems of monoliths, we built it as microservices and rebuilt the infrastructure to match. The talk covers that architecture and, just as much, how you actually handle microservices day to day.
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Current topics, formats, and the speaker bio are on the home page. The best invitations name the audience, the format, and the one question you want people to leave thinking about.