Software-Craftsmanship on tedn.life

AOC 2025 - Dark Factories for the win

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: AI helped turn my Scala meetup presentation, experiment reports, and notes into this post. The experiment and the argument are mine.

A funny thing happened while preparing my Scala meetup presentation. I set out to challenge a familiar claim: AI is good at Python because there is so much Python out there, but surely it struggles with a niche language like Scala.

First … a little disclosure …

I am quite far along the “let the AI cook” end of this spectrum. The red circle is me.

Fixing WIFIonICE On Ubuntu

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: AI helped turn live debugging notes into a polished write-up. The problem, commands, and final fix came from the actual session.

Sometimes the internet fails before you even get to the internet.

I was on an ICE train in Germany, connected my Ubuntu laptop to WIFIonICE, and waited for the login page to appear.

Nothing.

The WiFi was there. The laptop associated with the access point. But the captive portal did not open, and going to the usual login page did not help either.

Dark Factories Squared - Solving the MVF problem

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: So … this one is … 100% written by human/natural intelligence. I only used AI for spell-checking and polishing and the images.

Startups are hard. For a lot of reasons. One is that you not only need to fly/run the planes/features from A to B (with your customers on-board), you also need to build new planes — and you also need to build/configure/set-up the factory that builds/runs/operates the planes (the engineering org, processes, build-platform, runtime-/deployment-platform, …).

The ASEO - The New Process

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: This blog post was generated through a conversation with Claude Code. The research was AI-assisted. Here is the prompt that drove it:

“Research the top 3 AI-enabled software-development processes that are currently (last 3 months) discussed and suggested. Identify the top 3 AI-enabled full SDLC methodologies (end-to-end delivery frameworks, not just tools or single-step patterns) that are being actively discussed, proposed, or adopted in the software engineering community. For each: core idea, key proponents, adoption status, a ‘watch out’, and sources.”

The ASEO - Product Managers to the Rescue

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: This blog post was written with the help of Claude Code. Here is the prompt that drove it:

Prompt: “Take a look at the last 5 blog posts in content/posts. Especially the ones about the ASO. Write another blog post. The title is: The ASO - Product Managers to the rescue. The main idea/premise here is that the role of the PM has already changed (in the last 24 months). Today the AI-enabled PM is much more self-sufficient and independent than he/she used to be. The existing tooling (lovable, vercel, figma, … and the like) has already changed what PMs are doing and the way PMs work (one step closer to a feature fly-wheel). Please make sure the list of tools PMs use right now is complete and comprehensive (Top 10). The next step is to not only change how the PM is working, but to evolve the role itself. In that context we want to come up with a new name for a role that current PMs can play in the next better AI-enabled SDLC and write a job description for that role.”

Managing Transitions - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: This blog post was written with the help of Claude Code. Here is the prompt that drove it:

Prompt: “Write a new blog post: Managing Transitions - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. In the context of ASEO. Change leads to uncertainty, which leads to fear, which leads to resistance. People who resist the AI transformation either honestly believe it is bad and does not work, or they are afraid that the new jobs are jobs they either do not want to do or even worse cannot do. Change is uncomfortable. People who are comfortable feeling uncomfortable will thrive. AI-Adoption at an organizational level is not necessarily a technical problem, but more a communication challenge. You need to be able to articulate how the place you are going to looks like and why/how this is a good place for everybody involved. You know you have succeeded when the employees can see themselves in this new picture.”

Note: The blog post was polished and hardened by hand.

The ASEO - State of the Union

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Disclosure: This blog post was generated through a conversation with Claude Code. The research was AI-assisted. Here are the two prompts that drove it:

Prompt 1: “Let’s do some research. Who else is thinking and talking about the AI-assisted or AI-enabled Software Engineering Organization of the future? Who are the thought-leaders? And what do they say? What are the top 10 thoughts, ideas, predictions? Make sure the research focuses on the last 3 months. It needs to be current.”

Prompt 2: “Let’s create a ‘The ASEO - State of the Union’ blog post with these top 10 insights/findings. The insights/findings should be ~100 words and should feature a list of sources. Read some of the other blog posts to learn the style. Add pictures. Full disclosure: Put a statement at the top of the blog post to point out that the post was generated by AI and document the two prompts to explain where this is coming from.”

The AI-enabled Software-Engineering Organization (ASEO) - The next frontier

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am running The Augmented Software-Engineer (ASE) Meetup in Dublin. The other day we we had the first one for this year (Note: Fantastic event. Check it out the recap).

A year ago we had 50 members. Today we have ~750 members on the meetup-group. We are (all) learning a lot. Tools, Best Practices, Workflows, …

And some of the presentation are obviously “success-stories”. Mainly how much time you can save with using AI. In the best case you can for instance generate a complete Proof-of-Concepts (POC) or Minimal-Viable-Products (MVP) from scratch in less than a week (maybe down from a month), which sends a message along the lines of: AI makes Software-Engineers 400% faster/more productive!

Claude Code - Tools Primer

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This blog post was generated through a conversation with Claude based on my explorations of Claude Code’s architecture. You can read the full conversation here to see how we worked through these ideas together. The thoughts and arguments are mine, but Claude helped me articulate and structure them.

Let’s set the stage. Claude Code has been making waves in the agentic coding space. But if you dive into it, you’ll quickly encounter a constellation of concepts: Commands, Skills, Agents (Subagents), and MCP Servers. The marketing materials make them all sound essential. The reality? It’s more nuanced than that.

Whisper for Wayland - A vibe coding journey

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes it is the simple things that are hard.

These days I am doing a lot of vibe-coding or agentic-coding or … whatever you want to call it when you do not describe how to build something, but describe what you want the AI to build.

Meetup event photo — Source: secure.meetupstatic.com

And sometimes you reach a state of flow, when the requirements just flow out of you, but then you have to start typing and the typing can break the flow.

Replacing Skype - TEDN is using the force (again)

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

First of all: May the 4th be with you! Always!!!

Star Wars 'May the 4th be with you' themed image — Source: Flickr

Second: (Obviously) In May Microsoft is going to retire Skype and is asking everybody to migrate to Microsoft Teams.

Email from Microsoft announcing that Skype free services will be retired on May 5, 2025 — Photo: Roland Tritsch

My only use-case for Skype was to dial landline numbers from my (ubuntu) laptop. As an alternative I have looked into Google Voice, but was not able to associate my Irish mobile phone number with my Goggle account to enable the voice features.

Track-pad behaving erratic - TEDN problem from hell

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This goes into the bucket of problems-people-do-not-have-that-live-a-less-ambitious-life.

I am The Extreme Digital Nomad. I write code. Always and everywhere.

Right now I am in Athens Airport (in the FloCafe). I am sitting down. I plug in my laptop and connect to the internet. I go to my browser (to finish my installation of LibreChat (highly recommended; more on that in a separate blog post)) and realize that my mouse pointer is suddenly moving erratically. What the hell …

The AOC 2024 Retro - Finally!!!

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am calling it! I declare my Advent of Code (AOC) for 2024 done! Finally!

Clarification: This does not mean that I did all of it, but I did what I wanted to do and was able to do to make the tree look like this …

Advent of Code 2024 ASCII calendar showing stars earned across all 25 days — Photo: Roland Tritsch

The last star that was missing was part1 of Day21 (more on this later).

Ubuntu, Wayland, Sway - Just mirror the screen!

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a good one. Let me go back to the beginning …

Once upon a time there was a pandemic and during this pandemic we forgot how to do meetups.

We also (after the pandemic) updated and upgraded ourselves from Ubuntu/X11/i3 to Ubuntu/Wayland/Sway.

And the world was good. Until …

… I tried to do a live demo at the latest Augmented Software Engineering Meetup.

Imaging my surprise when I found out that with Ubuntu/Wayland/Sway there is no good/easy way to mirror your screen to a projector.

About AOC, VSCode, Scala, Mill and NO_COLOR

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It is this time of the year again: We are all doing the Advent of Code (AOC), right?

For me the AOC has never been about speed and solving the problems fast and the leaderboard.

For me it has always been about learning something new or getting better at something (sharpening the saw) or developing a new, better way to solve problems (also known as becoming a better software craftsman).

Huffman Trees/Codes - Why are they different?

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Right now I am solving the 99-scala-problems. Again!!!

This time around I am using them to learn more about what it means to be an Augmented Software Engineer (ASE). Just subscribe to the podcast to follow along.

P50 is to build a Huffman tree and to return the set of Huffman codes for the given string.

Diagram illustrating how a Huffman tree is built — Source: media.geeksforgeeks.org

codeium found a good implementation, but struggled to find tests that worked.

The Augmented Software Engineer - What is it?

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Updated …

2024-11-08: Added section at the end on published and planned episodes
2024-11-19: Added episode 3-5
2024-11-25: Added episode 6
2024-11-28: Added episode 7-10
2024-12-23: Added episode 11-13
2024-01-26: Added episode 14
2024-02-27: Added episode 15-17

I can hear you loud and clear …

Ooohhh my god: Not another blog post about AI!!!

Bear with me. I will try to make reading it (or watching it) worth while your time. I promise.

The Software Gardening Manifesto - A copy

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In case the Software Gardening Manifesto is down or otherwise not available, here is a copy of it …

SOFTWARE GARDENING MANIFESTO

Software Gardeners are professionals who perceive software development in a different way. Our goal is to spread the word of our core values, be mentors for the new developers and create software that it is developed at the highest quality bar.

Every software gardener believes and embraces the following:

Emacs Pair Programming - Innovation-Week Q2/2022

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We (at Community) just had another Innovation-Week. I was actually working on generating pact-files from frontend code and then generating openapi spec files from elixir backend code and then automatically check that the frontend pact is compatible with the backend openapi spec while running the build pipeline for the frontend(s)/backend.

But this is not what this blog post is all about :).

While working on this Geoff and myself also decided that it is a good opportunity to sharpen the tools and take remote-first pair-programming to the next level.

Reconnecting to RabbitMQ with AMQP in Elixir

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Updated (2022-01-01): Added stage.

At Community we are building a platform that will allow you to have meaningful conversations with large audiences … at scale!!!

The architectural backbone is a shared-nothing micro-services architecture, that uses an event-bus for state propagation.

To avoid any kind of 2-phase-commit shenanigans we are publishing events at-least-once (not exactly-once). That means our services need to be able to and are able to deal with duplicated events gracefully (by ignoring them).

Effective Programming with Scala(3)

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Just finished the brand new Effective Programming with Scala course on Coursera.

Coursera course certificate for Effective Programming in Scala — Photo: Roland Tritsch

It is a beginners course and it is excellent for beginners. Good introduction to Scala and also into the basics of functional programming.

But … for me the main attraction was that the course is based on (and is using) Scala3, means even if you are a seasoned Scala2 software engineer (and/or have not written Scala code in a while), this course is an excellent refresher that will allow you to grasp the essence of why/how Scala3 is different from Scala2 in the shortest possible time (I was playing the videos on 2x and was able to do all 6 weeks in 6x3=18 hours; and used the exercises to make my IDE (emacs/metals) work with Scala3).

Some more fun with Scala3

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Scala3 is officially released.

In my earlier post I saw some weird performance differences between Scala2 and Scala3 (RC3) and felt (obviously) compelled to run the benchmark again against 3.0.0.

Bar chart comparing per-day percentage performance difference for Scala 3.0.0-RC3 and the final Scala 3.0.0 release — Photo: Roland Tritsch

And … big surprise: Everything is back to normal. Scala3 is as fast as Scala2.

More fun with Scala3

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Note: Check out the 3.0 benchmark numbers

The release of Scala3 is imminent.

In April I ported/migrated nmesos from Scala2 to Scala3 and I just did a quick benchmark to see what Scala3 is doing to my Advent-of-Code implementation from 2017.

Initially I was wondering (and maybe a little bit afraid) how difficult migrating to Scala3 will be (and what problems I will be running into).

The good news is that migrating to Scala3 is not difficult at all. Mainly because of the Scala2/Scala3 interoperability, which means that as long as you are on Scala 2.13 you are more than half-way there.

Scala 3 is ... gluten-free!!!

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of month ago I started to have stomach cramps. First it was only once week, but then it was more or less constant.

Funny enough I had to find out that (even) late(r) in life you can “become” gluten-sensitive/-intolerant. Means … a couple of weeks ago I got myself tested and changed my diet (to (mostly) gluten-free) and (big surprise !!!) … after 3 days I was pain free!

Code Elixir LDN 2019 - 3 languages in 3 minutes

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I was in London attending Code Elixir LDN 2019 delivering a lightening talk on 3 languages in 3 minutes …

This was my first Elixir conference. We had about 100 people there. The conference was very well organized. From what I can see London is one the Elixir hotspots in Europe.