Intro I am often asked what a good Interim CTO does. A good interim CTO is like a technical Swiss Army knife. But that’s not really a good description. When I break down what I personally do as an Interim CTO, it boils down to exactly three things: Bridging the leadership gap Fix … | Continue reading
Introduction Writing and selling your own book is not complicated. The following post shows my approach to self-publishing. Publishing books is cool for many reasons. My main reason is not to make money through self-publishing, but to show how I operate as Interim Manager and Int … | Continue reading
Intro I recently book a flight with Lufthansa. Unfortunately, there was a strike and my flight was canceled. And when your flight is canceled then you get your money back. Easy. Or so I thought. It was not easy at all and highlighted some interesting processes at Lufthansa that s … | Continue reading
Table Of Contents Free Speech and Political Correctness Political Correctness in Business Coinbase Basecamp Google Changes Course Elon Musk and AI Conclusion Free Speech and Political Correctness The USA is the land of free speech. I think that’s amazing. And think that people sh … | Continue reading
I don’t sign NDAs (Non Disclosure Agreements). Wait. What? The Initial Consulting Call As a consultant and Interim CTO I have to talk to many potential clients. In other industries these talks are called sales calls. For me it is different. These initial talks are a way to unders … | Continue reading
SOCIAL MEDIA KILLED SEO. Wait. What? Intro More and more successful businesses are built around social media personalities. SEO stays relevant but is trailing. That seems to be especially true for new businesses entering the stage. If you want to make it big and break the SEO bar … | Continue reading
Intro The question of whether your company should be organized like a family or a professional sports team is not a new one. Recently, the trend seems to be leaning away from the family model and towards the sports team approach. Both have their pros and cons, and it’s worth expl … | Continue reading
Intro Will AI replace software engineering and programming? 🤔 My take: Absolutely and positively YES! Let’s checkout why. Software Engineering is Very Expensive and Not Very Productive We are doing lots of repetitive tasks during our daily lives as software engineers. Mov … | Continue reading
An Excellent Book Written by a Compensation Consultant As part of my Interim CTO assignments I frequently developed and put in place career ladders for my clients. One book that helped me quite a lot to was Michael O’Malley’s classic “Are You Paid What You’re Worth?” from 1998. O … | Continue reading
Note: This is an update to a post that was originally published on my old blog. Speed: Key Factor for Successful Interim Management There is a significant difference between a Permanent Manager and an Interim CTO. Permanent managers have a lot of time for onboarding. Usually, the … | Continue reading
On Work Performance Many of my assignments as Interim CTO are very very demanding and stressful. That’s cool and I like it that way. I am also mostly working in an office. Sitting most of the day. In my early 20s I experienced some very severe cases of back pain. And this was not … | Continue reading
Problem Your team is not performing well. How do you identify underperforming team members without undergoing a long and tedious feedback and performance cycle? Solution Implement the Netflix keeper test. The Netflix Keeper test operates by answering one simple question: “Which o … | Continue reading
Contrary to popular belief - the answer to everything is NOT 42 - it’s PostgreSQL. (ok. It might also be Postgres). Table Of Contents Intro Rock Solid and Stable Easy to Run, Install and Scale Simplifies Your IT Setup PostgreSQL Replaces Solr and Elastic: Full-Text Search Postgre … | Continue reading
Three States Design for three states when creating user interfaces: Regular State Blank State (First visit - or no data) Error State (Opsi! An error occurred) Most interfaces are only designed for the Regular State. As with everything - it’s a tradeoff. Think of All States - Not … | Continue reading
Dismiss your reports based on 1:1s that repeatedly don’t make you feel comfortable. Wait. What? That’s a surprising takeaway from a talk between Christian Hecker (Founder Trade Republic) and the host Philipp Westermeyer on the OMR podcast. Christian got these insights from Keith … | Continue reading
My Journey in Technology I began my coding journey in the 90s and landed my first paid jobs during the dot.com bubble in Germany. Since then, I’ve transitioned from being a coder to a manager, offering my expertise as an Interim CTO. Almost all the clients I’ve worked with, and a … | Continue reading
Bridging the Gap In 2021, I served as the Interim CTO for Mister Spex. The job was rather straightforward. The long-time outgoing CTO had embarked on a new journey, but the incoming CTO couldn’t start immediately, only in around six months. Consequently, I was hired to bridge the … | Continue reading
A Texas Trip In November 2023, I was delighted to spend several days with two awesome folks, Martin and Yamine, in Texas. We had the opportunity to experience the launch of Spaceship 2 (thanks, Elon!) and explore Texas and especially Houston and Austin. The entire trip was fantas … | Continue reading
Ships and Speed A long time ago, I read about shipping and the concepts of full prudent speed and breakneck speed. If you run your ship at a prudent speed, everything is under control. You don’t endanger anyone. You’ll deliver your goods, and everything will be fine. But sometime … | Continue reading
Intro In my Interim CTO career I’ve often seen software systems that were quickly developed and delivered to clients with great fanfare. Some of these systems were successful for a very long time. But some of them failed miserably after release and had to be rewritten from the gr … | Continue reading
Intro In the first part we investigated whether PostgreSQL could be used as storage for time series data. Our results were not bad, but the performance was too slow for our use-case. One option to increase the performance is the usage of specialized time-series databases. One of … | Continue reading
Intro Dokku is awesome. The Dokku Postgres plugin is awesome. And the postgres plugin allows you to specify the docker image to use for Postgres. As we want to use Timescale (also awesome) we should be able to simply specify Timescale’s postgres image so that the Dokku plugin can … | Continue reading
Intro As Interim CTO I deal with management topics. But I also deal a lot with IT architecture and high-performance systems. In one of my latest projects I had to deal with lots of IoT time-series data. Time series-data is a bit special because it has some distinct properties. Fi … | Continue reading
Intro Ever had the challenge of a CEO coming to one of you teams and requesting them to implement a super-urgent feature? I guess everyone leading tech teams or departments was already in that spot. But saying yes to every urgent request is simply not possible. It’s about priorit … | Continue reading
Musk and Twitter Musk is a salesman. Somewhere in 2022 he bought Twitter to make it his social network. I am not sure if this was his plan from day 1 - but the publicly bragged about buying twitter so much that he had to buy it. Otherwise that bragging would have put him into ser … | Continue reading
Intro Authentication and authorization is the bread and butter business of IT systems and web apps. Done right they allow you to write applications that integrate with any authentication systems seamlessly. From simple user/password to Google, LDAP and custom SAML systems. Good a … | Continue reading
Intro Somewhen in 2022 I decided to switch from normal hot showers to cold showers. I can’t really remember why I did this. We had an energy crisis in Germany and some politicians recommended to take cold showers. Sure - but I am not the person that starts taking cold showers jus … | Continue reading
Introduction GPT models are remarkable and can do a lot of things. From writing code to translating texts to generating new content. I personally use GPT models to generate texts from bullet points very very frequently. I no longer write emails myself, but collect the important p … | Continue reading
Introduction When working as Interim CTO the topic of SEO frequently comes up. SEO influences many management decisions and for an interim manager it is crucial to know the basics. Good SEO can make a great company, bad SEO can break. Let’s check out how I set up SEO for my own b … | Continue reading
Discover how GPT-4 can assist in writing tests for JavaScript code. In this blog post, we dive into a practical example of generating Jasmine tests for a given JavaScript function. Not only does the AI model understand the code's structure and logic, but it also creates detailed, … | Continue reading
TL;DR Consider using two basic metrics for your tech teams: “Cycle Time” and “Team Happiness”. It is crucial to ensure they are correctly defined and understood by all team members. Once these metrics are embedded, allow your teams the freedom to experiment with new ones as neede … | Continue reading
Establishing Leadership in Growing Organizations In mature tech organizations, each of your teams would have a team lead. The team lead takes care of various responsibilities such as conducting 1:1s, managing performance, handling PIPs, allocating budgets, and much more. These te … | Continue reading
A Recurring Theme Sometimes you read books that are so good that you re-read them multiple times. “Peopleware” by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister is such a book. The theme of the book is that most problems are people problems - not tech problems. And this is true today - as it was tru … | Continue reading
When Software Slowly - then Suddenly - Gets Outdated In my time as consultant I’ve seen many companies and software systems. One recurring theme was outdated libraries in self-written software. And I can see where this comes from: Engineering departments are there to deliver grea … | Continue reading
Intro I just met a friend and we came to the topic of procastination. People that procastinate obviously can’t reach their full potential. Procastination is not cool. How can we then make sure to not do it? I am myself a master-procastinator - but I found some ways to hack myself … | Continue reading
Intro OKRs can be used to manage the team of a report jointly with the report, or manage one report (personal OKRs). Try out what fits best for you. I find it useful having OKRs to manage reports / teams of reports over quarters and years. I posted my OKR sheet as Google Spreadsh … | Continue reading
My One-on-One Template Over the years I’ve developed a pretty cool way to run one-on-ones. Well. At least this is what I think about it ;) I usually keep my own one-on-one notes and do not share these notes with my report directly. Many people do this differently and this is also … | Continue reading
Introduction Some engineering departments rock. Some suck. But how can you tell the difference? One option is to run an exhaustive due diligence. Examine all teams. Examine all processes. Examine technology. Examine management. That’s important. But it will take time and your can … | Continue reading
TL;DR Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) are a lightweight tool to document your decisions. They were invented by Michael Nygard in 2011. ADRs help you, your team and a potential successor to understand why something has been built in a certain way. ADRs are a great tool to thi … | Continue reading
Two Characteristics of Great Managers Many companies have large matrices to grade managers based on an extensive set of criteria. In my opinion there are exactly two things successful managers do: The manager goes the extra mile and does exceptional things frequently The teams of … | Continue reading
Two Ways to Praise Praise is important. If someone did something good we should mention that! But there are two ways you can do that Option one is to say “You did this very well!”. Option two is to say “Thank you for supporting us”. The Superior Way to Praise The first version is … | Continue reading
Background Our challenge was to insert data into a sqlite database as quickly as possible. You can find a lot of information on insert performance on the internet. Most information is already a couple of years old. Sqlite has improved. The drivers have improved. Java has improved … | Continue reading
Intro Being an exceptional leader takes behaviors that everyone can observe. But there are also smaller, subtle things that the best leaders do. One of these small, subtle things is to praise and say thanks! Praise Among Employees - An Example One of our teams is currently creati … | Continue reading
Jefferson What? I recently learned about the Jefferson dinner. How does it look like? 8-15 people with diverse opinions. All at one table. With food. And one big topic. Caveat: Only one person talks at a time. At the end everyone gives a short summary what they’ve learned. Conclu … | Continue reading
TL;DR The product manager has to work on two areas: Discovery and delivery. Most of the time is spent on discovery. Engineers will handle most delivery tasks. Product managers that spend too much time on delivery will fail in both areas. Note: I am using “product manager” and “pr … | Continue reading
TL;DR Meetings without clear structure and action items are a waste of time Use a checklist to remind everyone to do effective meetings Intro You likely all know this kind of meetings. Someone invites a group to discuss an important topic. The meeting starts. A lively discussion … | Continue reading
TL;DR Go without a separate QA team by default Hire engineers that write tests on the proper level and own the quality aspect QA sometimes make sense when applied carefully as detailed below Intro I just read a very nice post by Regina Gerbeaux and Case Sandberg about “Setting up … | Continue reading
Peter Drucker and one question Peter Drucker is likely the founder of the science of management and leadership. His research centered around one question: “What makes leaders effective?”. That question sounds simple, but leaders come in all shapes, sizes and with many many differ … | Continue reading