A lead recently approached me for a quote to rebuild a web application. Instead of providing an estimate immediately, I asked why they needed a rebuild and if we could continue with the current application developed only six years ago. I spoke with their CIO; unfortunately, the answer was No…

We recently audited a company in Germany. The investor wanted us to fly over to Hamburg for in-person interviews. It was on very short notice and a small audit, with only two to three interviews. In the past years, we have done over a hundred audits of start- and scale-ups…

Sometimes, the most minor details can make the most significant impact. As an established company based in Belgium, we have always embraced our madewithlove.be domain name, despite our global reach. But a revelation during an annual retreat discussion on diversity changed everything. Sometimes, the most minor details can make the…

A little over ten years ago, I felt so annoyed with testing Apache’s mod_rewrite RewriteRules that I started looking for a tool to test them. The search was unsuccessful — no such tool to be found. Out of my frustration, I decided to write something myself. I hacked together a…

During a rare visit to our offices, a customer was extremely surprised to find that literally everybody in the office was wearing headphones while doing their work. (Except for me, of course — that would have been rude.) It also struck him that only a few desks were being used…

In the past months, I have asked myself a lot why we always strive to write perfect code. Picking up coding again for an internal project made me realise our team (and probably a large part of the rest of the software development world) spend a lot of time on…