Website Kristof Adriaenssens RSS feed / This blog post suggests what can be done at team level to avoid overloading a team with work. This is the 2nd blog post in a series of three about too much work in progress (WIP). In the 1st post you can read about the consequences of overloading teams with... Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500 /2025-01-12-how-to-avoid-overloading-teams-with-work-team-level/ /2025-01-12-how-to-avoid-overloading-teams-with-work-team-level/ In 2023, we let a company install a Photovoltaic (PV) system (solar panels) on the flat roof of our house. The team installing the PV system had a packed schedule which resulted in some unexpected consequences which I’ll share in this blog post. In a follow-up blog post I’ll come... Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400 /2024-09-01-the-consequences-of-overloading-teams-with-work/ /2024-09-01-the-consequences-of-overloading-teams-with-work/ This blog post describes how I set-up basic read-only note sharing with Obsidian (without using Obsidian Sync) for me and my partner who share the same computer. I’ve been using Evernote for personal use with a paying account since 2011 but recently I switched to Obsidian. Evernote still worked okay... Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0400 /2024-06-01-basic-readonly-sharing-obsidian-notes/ /2024-06-01-basic-readonly-sharing-obsidian-notes/ This blog post describes how we identified and addressed the root causes of a slowdown of delivery of value. The Olympus Mobility product development team is a multi-disciplinary team with backend developers, a web developer, mobile app developer, product designer and with the CTO and CEO sharing the product management... Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0400 /2022-10-18-improving-the-flow-of-work/ /2022-10-18-improving-the-flow-of-work/ The question when will it be done? is a question every team that’s building software has to answer at some point. Customers or business stakeholders want to know when a specific set of functionality will be ready or they want to know what scope of functionality they can get by... Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 -0400 /2021-10-31-predictability/ /2021-10-31-predictability/ Stretch opportunities are important for growth and for keeping employees engaged. In a new post I share how our team at SoundCloud created a process that allows engineers to take on stretch opportunities which benefit both individuals and the team: Stretch Opportunities for Engineers. Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400 /2020-05-20-stretch-opportunities-for-engineers/ /2020-05-20-stretch-opportunities-for-engineers/ This post is written in Dutch as it compares living and working in Berlin, Germany with Flanders, Belgium. The comparisons and insights are most useful for people living in Flanders whose main language is Dutch. Ik heb de eerste 35 jaar van mijn leven in Vlaanderen, België gewoond, en het... Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400 /2019-06-13-wonen-en-werken-in-Berlijn-Duitsland/ /2019-06-13-wonen-en-werken-in-Berlijn-Duitsland/ I’m a Pinboard user and I noticed that since upgrading to Safari 12 the existing Pinboard extensions that are distributed as .safariextz files were not officially supported anymore. Instead Apple introduced a new Safari App Extension Architecture. These new type of extensions are developed using Xcode and allow you to... Sun, 03 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0500 /2019-03-03-bookmarker-for-pinboard/ /2019-03-03-bookmarker-for-pinboard/ I wrote another blog post on the SoundCloud Developers blog earlier this year: Managing Unplanned and Support Tasks. The blog post explains how my team set up a process to deal with a large increase in unplanned and support work by becoming responsible for a larger domain with fewer people... Thu, 07 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400 /2018-06-07-managing-unplanned-and-support-tasks/ /2018-06-07-managing-unplanned-and-support-tasks/ I wrote a blog post on the SoundCloud Developers blog about our current status and some of our learnings since introducing microservices. You can read it here. Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400 /2016-07-30-request-reponse-style-communication-between-microservices/ /2016-07-30-request-reponse-style-communication-between-microservices/ I was interviewed by Sam Newman at the SoundCloud office as part of his Magpie Talk Show podcast series. We mainly talked about Zipkin and Distributed Tracing but also about how the team I am part of at SoundCloud supports the engineering organisation with libraries and tools to build microservices.... Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400 /2015-10-15-interviewed-by-sam-newman/ /2015-10-15-interviewed-by-sam-newman/ Yesterday I moved brave from https://github.com/kristofa/brave to https://github.com/openzipkin/brave I started brave in April 2013 after I saw a presentation about Zipkin but soon found out that integrating Zipkin in a Spring Java app was not that straight forward. I started it on github thinking it might be useful to others…... Fri, 17 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400 /2015-07-17-brave-moved-to-openzipkin/ /2015-07-17-brave-moved-to-openzipkin/ Using Apache Flume or another transport/messaging system allows you to decouple the consumers from the producers of the data you generate. It allows you to have multiple consumers without changing the system that produces the data and it can also deal with failures by buffering the data in case consumers... Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400 /2014-06-09-add-loadbalancing-to-zipkin-flume-integration/ /2014-06-09-add-loadbalancing-to-zipkin-flume-integration/ Fast feedback is very important during software development. The Agile Manifesto has several principles that stress the importance of fast feedback which results in validating sooner that what we are building works and is what our customer wants. One aspect of fast feedback is that the tests that we write... Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400 /2014-04-07-the-importance-of-fast-test-feedback/ /2014-04-07-the-importance-of-fast-test-feedback/ In last few months I looked into Zipkin which is a ‘Distributed Systems Tracing’ framework implementation open sourced by Twitter and implemented based on the Dapper paper published by Google. While looking into Zipkin I decided to create a Java implementation of the Dapper paper which can integrate with Zipkin... Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400 /2013-05-05-about-dapper-zipkin-brave/ /2013-05-05-about-dapper-zipkin-brave/ I like to use the Maven site plugin to generate documentation for a project because it has the advantage that the documentation is versioned together with the source code and that the site is generated automatically when releasing your software using the Maven release plugin. The project information and reports... Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500 /2013-02-18-plantuml-diagrams-maven-site-documentation/ /2013-02-18-plantuml-diagrams-maven-site-documentation/ I see quite some people who use Linux fiddling with external display settings when they have to give a presentation. I have configured my Xubuntu 12.04 to make this a lot easier. What I explain should also work with regular Ubuntu or any other recent Linux distribution. It wouldn’t be... Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500 /2013-01-27-my-external-display-config-setup-xubuntu/ /2013-01-27-my-external-display-config-setup-xubuntu/