p I map my AI-in-production workflow to the software development lifecycle, from discovery to operations, with clear handoffs between AI agents and human owners. The core idea: agentic engineering is not a coding trick but a delivery system for reliable software. /p >
p Static training plans break when life happens. N+One is a conversational AI coach that adapts to readiness, constraints, and goals in real time to make elite coaching principles accessible to every athlete. /p >
p I want to share my workflow for moving from vibe coding to agentic engineering. I will walk you through the process of defining a feature, exploring the UI in v0, integrating the code in Cursor, reviewing and refactoring the code, and testing, merging, and shipping the feature. /p >
p With the release of Claude Opus 4.5 and the hype surrounding "engineering-grade" models, I moved beyond frontend generation to test their capabilities as full-stack engineers. I took the three current heavyweights GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5 and ran them through a rigorous MVP development cycle to build 'Speakit', a text-to-speech application, to see if benchmark numbers…
p AI Frontend Generator tools are experiencing a significant surge in popularity and adoption across the industry, with what appears to be multiple new tools being released and announced each week. With the recent surge in attention around Claude Code and similar AI-powered development tools, now is the perfect time to examine these platforms in depth and understand how they truly compare. I have…
p This article explores the challenges and opportunities of leading remote engineering teams. It examines key challenges such as communication, performance management, and feedback, while also highlighting the benefits of a global talent pool, improved work-life balance, and increased innovation. The article provides actionable strategies for building high-performing remote teams. /p >
p For engineering teams, measuring the right things is crucial for success. This post explores how to build an effective engineering metric program that aligns with product goals and drives continuous improvement. It covers topics such as defining relevant KPIs for engineering, turning data into actionable insights, and fostering collaboration with other departments. Learn how to move beyond…
p Generative AI (GenAI) is revolutionizing front-end development, empowering developers to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and unleash their creativity. This article explores the transformative potential of GenAI, delving into practical examples using ChatGPT, Bard, and v0. It highlights their capabilities in generating UI components, crafting user-friendly interfaces, and providing…
p Engineering managers are the unsung heroes of tech, the driving force behind a company's technological achievements. They are not just managers; they are leaders, visionaries, and mentors who play a pivotal role in shaping a company's culture and steering it towards success. In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, companies rely heavily on their engineering teams to drive innovation,…
p I want to share my experience of transitioning from an individual contributor role to a management position in my engineering career. Although I know that the management track is distinct from that of an individual contributor, I realized that it is a common path for career growth in many organizations. The journey was filled with both challenges and rewards, and I learned the importance of…
p This article discusses the importance of software architecture and recommends a list of great software architecture podcasts for listeners to explore. It begins by defining software architecture and explaining its significance in software development. The article then moves on to highlight the benefits of listening to software architecture podcasts, including staying up to date with the latest…
p As AI continues to become more integrated into frontend development, the role of engineers will shift towards a focus on collaboration and strategy. In this article, I explore the three layers of AI tooling and how they can be used to generate a design system. We also discuss the importance of engineers in controlling the output of these tools, ensuring that it's tailored to the context it's…
p Maximize your job search potential with the power of AI! As the buzz surrounding OpenAI's GPT-3 grows, I discovered its amazing potential for enhancing CVs. With the job market competitive, a standout resume is crucial for landing your next job. That's why I developed ResumerX, a tool leveraging OpenAI's API to elevate your CV and give you an edge in the interview process. /p >
p Who hasn't experienced some messed up refinements where you thought, "Why am I here? This is a waste of my time". So yeah, doing refinements right, is a hard task. /p >
p Every manager's ultimate task is to build successful teams. In my career, it has become apparent to me that as a manager, you have to monitor your teams closely in order to reach that goal. This will enable you as a manager to discover when a team is overwhelmed with their work. /p >
p Throughout my career, I held different roles at companies and saw how developers progress in their careers. I want to share my observation of how developers got into the positions that they progressed in. When you start as a Junior Engineer, there are certainly lots of things to learn what it takes to do the job. There are many open ends, so it is easy to grab one and start growing. As a Senior…
p With our german-speaking podcast Working Draft we introduced a new community to gather our listeners and interested engineers and designers to discuss related topics. /p >
p Speaking with software engineers in my team and through my mentoring with a href="/blog/mentoring-club" The Mentoring Club /a one question keeps coming up: ldquo;What is the next step in my career? rdquo; For everyone that is working in the industry and eager to grow personally, this question is a constant companion. I want to give you my perspective on how you can advance in your career after…
p I am honored to announce that I am a part of The Mentoring Club as a mentor. Read the full article for practical guidance and examples. /p >
p The FYEO database held around 1.6 million podcasts on its peak. Each one of those podcasts does have quite a number of episodes which contain the real contents users are intested in: the audio track. And this is the stuff that every podcast platform wants to display to their customers. As soon as it comes out, is published. And as soon as people are searching for it. Let me take you on the…
p In the last years my career took a turn into the direcation of technical management. While I listen to a lot of podcasts on a daily basis I started to collect a list of podcasts that help me stear through my work. Here is a list of podcasts for engineering managers, tech leaders and software architects. /p >
p Today we are sad to announce the end of Warhol. We did not see the growth that we hoped for in the past few months and actually getting Warhol's core idea to work proved way harder than we anticipated. We did not see a way forward within our budget of time, money and energy and thus decided to pull the plug. All that development has ceased, backend services are offline, contracts have been…
p Yesterday I decided to take a look at a href="https://deno.land/" Deno /a and how to get startet with it. Deno v1 a href="https://deno.land/v1" was released roughly a week ago /a so I though I give it a try and have a look in how far I can make use of it in the near future. Here is how I port an existing Express application to Deno. /p >
p Warhol turns pattern libraries into test suites. It helps you to enforce a unified look and feel for your web project, no matter how large and complicated the project may be. Warhol learns from the examples in a pattern library and supports you in implementing a truly consistent user experience. /p >
p In this post I want to show a way to use Higher-Order Components with React Hooks in order to structure complex components. This method can be described as an architectural pattern to give hooks a straight forward way to use them in order to prevent developers from falling for the traps hooks do have. /p >
p This article covers the way me and the team I am working with migrate a React application from JavaScript to TypeScript over the last couple of months and onwards. The goal is to help developers with the same idea to get a hold on where to start. Here is how to find the right starting point. /p >
p The state of how developers write code changes with the experience they gain. I tried to describe the phases that I have experienced within the last couple of years and tried to generalize them. /p >
p When I was working in a small agency, years ago, in Germany's warmest city, Freiburg, my boss introduced the team to agile working methods that he had read a book about. We had a whiteboard with some columns on them named To Do, Doing, Done. Some stickies were on these columns. We had a fast-lane which was filled with tasks all the time. I felt I was doing quite some work when fulfilling the…
p With Heroku you can easily setup deployment and hosting of your application in the cloud. Here are 6 steps how to quickly set up your Node.js application on Heroku. /p >
p I've written a transmitter which collects data from a href="https://www.contentful.com/" Contentful /a and indexes it in a href="https://www.algolia.com/" Algolia /a . It is written in Node.js and really simple. The application syncs content between Contentful and Algolia. You can configure the service to run with Drafts (Preview API) from Contentful and put it in different indexes in Algolia.…
p In the past I have written about how I use npm scripts for my build tooling. With this article I want to write about some problems I had and how I solved them. The problems I want to talk about further: Concurrency Extensive build configuration Build environments /p >
p When ever I do a front-end review for webpages I start compiling a new checklist of things that I need to take into account for the review. Now I tried to collect some of the most important questions to check for and release them publically. /p >
p We tend to solve a lot of problems related to the front-end by delegating them to existing programs. We use libraries and tools which we don t understand completely - our code base grows and grows. But lately this trend seems to change and we slowly re-consider what we can do best: develop front-end code. What can we expect from this new trend and how can we use them in out daily business today?…
p When writing JavaScript applications or websites a lot of developers write unit tests to ensure the code does what it is supposed to do. The hottest code uses ES6 and transpiles to ES5 with Babel. Mocha is pretty popular as a testing framework these days. Bringing these tools together can be cumbersome. Here is how you do it. /p >
p npm is a Node.js dependency management system. It provides a script object in a project s package.json configuration which can hold several CLI scripts. It is possible to run those via your command line. This way it is possible to replace your current build system. This article covers more about how you replace different tasks of a typical front-end build workflow. /p >
p Different projects I have worked on used Sass as the pre-compiler of their choice. This post shares some learnings we had while using Sass. There are a couple of great articles on how to use Sass in large scale projects this one is more of a retrospective. I hope it helps you solving problems if you ever run into them. I wrote about some of my recent projects and the learnings I had. /p >
p INIT is based upon HTML5 Boilerplate and adds more structure for SCSS files, JavaScripts, includes build tasks and a whole lot more. Today we released INIT, a front-end framework based on Grunt, Bower, Karma and a lot more tools as version 1.0. This marks a special day for Anselm and me, as we worked for a long period to get this project to where it is today. Over at TNG I wrote a bit about why…
p We don't need this anymore With Modernizr v2.7.0 we don't need this work around anymore. Please update to this version if you use lt;main gt;. tl;dr: You can add the new main-element to Modernizr 2.6.2 by using HTML5 Shiv's window.html5 option to add your own elements to the shiv. Since I use some bleeding edge stuff in HTML and CSS in actual projects for clients I ran into one particular issue…
p tl;dr: It's necessary to keep the focus within a dialog while tabbing through it. The function below is the easiest way to implement this behavior in JavaScript. When I created CSS Modal I wanted it to be accessible for screen readers and people that only use the keyboard for navigation. Nicholas Zakas has a great post that helped me a lot with making CSS Modal accessible without too much work.…
p In the last couple of months I've worked on several projects that needed an overlay with some content on it. Some front-end frameworks as for example Bootstrap refer to them as modals. You can find a lot of implementations that do exactly what I search for but they all have one major drawback: They rely on JavaScript. Yes, sure, everyone has JavaScript enabled these days but why use a technique…
p While it is possible to consume nearly all means of content on your smartphone or tablet it seems like the dream of a paperless office comes true for a lot of web developers. But digital natives are not the only ones who are on the web. There are still some people that like to print web sites on paper. Once you are aware of that you might want to include a dedicated print stylesheet into web…
p Here is a quick overview of my current status and why there are little updates in the blog. Also some great news. Talking at Conferences As you know, if you follow along my stuff, I spoke about coding guidelines at TalkOff Conference in Lille, France in January this year. The conference was organized very well and I had a lot of fun. Besides that I met a lot of great people. Thanks again for the…
p Yesterday (17. January 2013) I was talking at TakeOff Conference in Lille, France. I actually extended my talk from the Fronteer #8217;s Jam Session #8220;Writing Awesome Code #8221; with lots of new stuff. So check out the slides. There will be a video with the actual talk that is not online yet. I will post it here when it is. See slides Just a few words concerning the conference: The…
p Since a while now word has spread to use the CSS unit rem for font-sizes and values in CSS. Here I want to explain how you can use a fallback in Sass or LESS to get rem working in all browsers. View Gist with mixins Why rem? Let #8217;s look into what rem means. We know of the em unit which is relative to the font-size of the parent element it is defined on. This means if one of the parents in…
p It #8217;s been over two years now with our podcast Working Draft we have done 100 revisions. Congratulations to ourselves! We recorded revision 100 on Monday and had a very special guest: Paul Irish. That #8217;s why we recorded in English this time. The final podcast is now live and can be downloaded. Check it out and let us know what you think. Listen to WD Revision 100 Here are the topics we…
p Yesterday Kahlil Lechelt and I launched The Nitty Gritty, a new blog and resource for web developers about the cutting edge in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and web technology in general. Visit The Nitty Gritty About the idea of The Nitty Gritty Kahlil writes: For a few years now, I #8217;ve been watching my friends in the web development community write highly informative and well researched articles…
p Within the last weeks I had the pleasure to attend some of the most valuable conferences in our business and meet awesome people to chat with. Finally I want to share some of my experiences and invite you what #8217;s coming next. Smashing Conference Back in the end of September I attended Smashing Conference, set up by Smashing Magazine and Marc Thiele with some high quality speakers in…
p Here is how and why you should write awesome code in your team. I gave a 10 minute talk on that topic at Fronteers Conference at the Jam Session and here are the slides. There will be a video available online in a few weeks I think. lt;/p /p >
p After Yeoman was announced in the end of June while it was still in private beta developers were looking forward to use it soon. It was introduced as a tool that helps developers building web-apps while not having to care too much about the general boilerplate-coding to build a solid base for every project and to help performing tasks to bring your project into production. Now that Yeoman is…
p HTML5 Boilerplate is out with the new version 4.0.0. There were some significant changes since the last version that are listed up in the changelog (also see below). Most of them because of the excellent work by Nicolas Gallagher - thanks for leading HTML5 Boilerplate with such great effort. What #8217;s new? This was done throughout the last seven months of development and resolving bugs: Add…