8 OKR introduction mistakes you don't need to make
I'm not an OKR expert — but I've watched the same eight mistakes kill rollouts. Here's how to skip them…
André Lademann
Engineering blog about cloud architecture, software development, and modern tooling.
Latest posts
Every Unused Token Is a Wasted Token
Thinkport gave everyone a Claude Team seat two months ago. Then our boss published the usage numbers and praised the biggest spender — which is exactly the right instinct and exactly the wrong metric…
I'm addicted to AI tokens
Claude, Copilot, Cursor — three subscriptions, endless side ideas, and ClaudeBar keeping me honest about how fast the tokens vanish…
Agent Skills Need a Package Manager Too
Skills are becoming how enterprises encode their processes for AI agents — but where does the code live, who owns it, and how does a repo declare which ones it needs? A package manager problem in disguise…
Die Sterne Put Out a New Album and I'm Glad to Be Listening Again
Wenn es Liebe ist is out, and I'm really glad — not because it sent me back in time, but because Die Sterne have me hitting play again…
AI Security Architect: Why This Might Be the Most Valuable Tech Role of 2026
Why the AI Security Architect is becoming one of the most in-demand tech roles: the skills, the stats, and how to position yourself for it.
My Peugeot 304 vs. the German TÜV
My 1974 Peugeot 304 sailed through the French roadworthiness test. The German TÜV is proving to be a different beast entirely…
Learn Kubernetes in Five Minutes a Day
Kubernetes has a reputation for being hard to get into. I built a free, browser-based learning path so you can start from zero and make real progress…
What The Pixies Taught Me About Music as a Time Machine
Last night The Pixies played the Parkbühne Leipzig without a single pause, and I couldn't stop thinking about why old songs pull us backwards so hard...
Why Good Retrospectives Still Feel Like a Chore
I genuinely believe in retrospectives. So why do I always leave feeling deflated? It's about what we choose to look at...
MCP in Enterprise: The Speed-vs-Security Trap
New MCP servers drop every day, and they're genuinely useful — but in an enterprise context, every one of them is a door you're propping open...
Let's get serial
The Web Serial API is a browser-based interface that makes it possible to communicate with hardware devices via the serial interface. It is mainly used for communication with development boards such as the ESP32 or Arduino Uno to send and receive dat...
Rich Snippets in Emails: Action Buttons and Cards with Schema.org
How to embed Schema.org markup in emails to add Track Order buttons, event cards, and more — directly visible in Gmail's inbox view.
Build Review Apps in GitHub Like in GitLab with Azure Static Web Applications
GitLab makes it trivial. Here's how to get the same isolated preview environments on GitHub using Azure Static Web Applications and GitHub Actions.
What is pubspec.lock for
It is good practice to version the pubspec.lock file in a Flutter project. The pubspec.lock file contains an accurate record of the versions of the dependencies (packages) used in your Flutter project. By versioning this file, you ensure that your pr...
Custom ChatGPT with OpenAI API
OpenAI's API is surprisingly easy to use. It is no different from other REST APIs. So integrating AI into your own software is easy, and we will see AI being integrated into more and more applications. Be it in ticket systems, email clients, content ...
Custom fake data generator
In 2019 (and still in 2022), we probably do not need to create data, we just need to print out one of the famous Twitter channels. Just kidding. :) Sometimes we need millions, I mean gigabytes of test data, which are really close to the data we are u...
git rebase -Xtheirs and -Xours: Resolving Conflicts Automatically
How -Xtheirs and -Xours work in git rebase — and why they mean the exact opposite of what you'd expect.
Gamification has a lot of potential for companies!
Inspired by my famous CSS YouTuber Kevin Powell and his CSS battles on YouTube, I organised a CSS battle in my company, Netresearch. Why? I noticed how quickly after a few tasks on CSS-battle, I was up to speed again. I learned so many new things, ...
Using MJML to improve your email in Node-RED
Sending emails with Node-RED is very easy. The email node is easy to configure. Variables can be used in the content area, which we can use to include sensor data, for example. If you want to send an email in HTML format, there is a lot to consider, ...
Benchmark - What is the quickest way to copy files?
Purpose In software development, there is sometimes a need to copy a large amount of file from one directory to another. For instance, when you have shared volumes in a Docker environment with different services, some services need to have access to ...
The reversed .gitignore
The .gitignore is there to prevent files from ending up in git's version management that have no business being there. You can find them in most repositories in the world. Creating these is a tedious and sometimes tricky task. For example, files that...
Trainees in the IT industry in Germany
Today I was having lunch with IT colleagues and we were talking about our trainee. One colleague who previously worked in another industry thought that his manner was inappropriate for a trainee. When I was an apprentice, I could not have allowed mys...
YAGNI
You Aren't Gonna Need It — why building features before they're requested burns money and complicates codebases.
VS Code includes GitHub's CoPilot and I just love it!
The year is 2021, and Elon Musk is so scared about AI and its danger to humanity that he is pushing to build big rockets 🚀 to land on Mars as soon as possible. And he has to know it, he is one of the investors in OpenAI, a company (largely owned ...
Pair programming
In pair programming, two developers work simultaneously on one source code. The method helps to develop better software products. Advantages At Netresearch, we use this method and derive many advantages from it: Direct knowledge exchange about meth...
DRY 🍸️ – design pattern
Excuses to do it "It's another project. I don't know much about it. Don't wanna break something, so I just copied it." "I don't have time, maybe later …" "Maybe later on, I want to have something different in each function/template/class, so it's be...
KISS 😘 – design pattern
Yah, that's a very emotional speech for a programming design pattern. As a side note, it tells us about the many stories in which they have struggled through complex programming code of their colleagues or even themselves from the past. keep it small...
Job with a daily dose of goose bumps
What I love about my job is that I can listen to my favourite music at any time. I bought extra over-ear headphones because I want to wear them as long as possible without pain. In what other job would I have goose bumps early in the morning? This mo...
Okay let's blog
@adriantwarog told me in his article "Programmers That Don't Blog Should Start Right Now" to start blogging because every developer should do it. Maybe not all, but I agree that every developer I know who blogs is a good developer. And since I want ...