Engineering & Product on

Be a Shepherd, Not a Fence: Why We Need to Stop Gatekeeping "Vibe Coders"

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0100

We’ve seen this movie before.

If there’s something I genuinely dislike in our industry, it’s gatekeeping. And the current patronization and disdain towards “vibe coders”—domain experts leveraging AI to build software—is exactly that.

Every time we unlock a new layer of abstraction, the reaction is the same. Think back to C vs. JavaScript: “They’re not real programmers, they don’t even manage memory.” Or the backlash against low-code, or the dismissal of bootcamp graduates.

The Other Debt: When "Good Engineering" Ignores Economic Sustainability

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 22:00:00 +0000

We engineers love talking about technical debt. It’s our go-to metaphor, and it works - people understand debt. But we’ve been looking at sustainability through only one lens. We obsess over code quality, architecture, test coverage - and we call the absence of these things “technical debt”.

What we rarely talk about is the literal debt. Code that is technically good but the business can’t afford to maintain is not good code.

📥 Importing my LinkedIn archive into Hugo

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000

For years I’ve been publishing on LinkedIn. And for years I’ve had the same discomfort: it’s my content, but it lives in someone else’s garden. That’s why initially I liked “blogging”… but that’s mainly fun if you have an audience (which LinkedIn gives you access to).

LinkedIn is increasingly a walled garden (and getting more aggressive about external links), so I wanted a way to keep my own words on my own website, without paying yet another platform subscription for the privilege.

🦄 Why Engineers Need "Alchemy": Beyond Factual Correctness to Human Magic

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:08:00 +0000

🦄 Why Engineers Need “Alchemy”: Beyond Factual Correctness to Human Magic

After recommending “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, I bring today another book recommendation that should be on the list for all technologists: Rory Sutherland’s “Alchemy”. I especially enjoyed reading it after Kahneman’s book, to add a bit of color to the “cognitive biases” more as to what they are: how we think and make decisions. "

Here’s why these two books are secret weapons for technologists who want to spark passion, and not only “convince with data”:

Some matches are just destined to work. When Li...

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 12:48:33 +0000

Some matches are just destined to work. When Liza and I came in contact from Mirela from Product People we KNEW we had to do something together 🙌

They have such a great network of speakers and product-minded professionals, and give so much to the community. From SumUp we want to “give back” and contribute with our learnings on building an international product from SumUp and our Tribe - Liza will share some of the insights of how we have turned our “pain points” into processes that “just work” and bring people together as collaboration.

Didactic transparency

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 10:12:21 +0000

Didactic transparency

One of the recurring themes in discussions of psychological safety and leading teams through change is transparency. In the current digital age, data is ubiquitously generated and abundant.

This leads to an issue I have seen: giving access to the data is not enough to grant you transparency. Data can be interpreted in multiple ways, it can have very varying levels of trustworthiness and a

This.

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 21:28:41 +0000

This.

There shouldn’t be a separate “engineering roadmap” to start with. Same as “product roadmap”, “marketing roadmap”, or “design roadmap”.

(get your Freddy Mercury karaoke vibe and mentally repeat) One team, one vision - one roadmap, no division 🎸

The capacity of the team should be looked at as a holistic system, and the leaders should align on how to use the capacity across all teams best. What’s the point of having a “product roadmap” that leads to invisible technical debt being introduced, that will slow down your team as tangled ropes on your team wheels?

What a blast this event is!

Thu, 12 May 2022 15:06:06 +0000

What a blast this event is!

I’m having such a great time joining others’ ideas and following David and Sandy Phi direction – and being back to contributing as an engineer!

Pairing up with other engineers while unrusting my DevOps skills (from idea to deployment in one day!), reviewing ideas together, and thinking how the creative ideas we’re coming with can help our merchants be more successful ⚡️

And especially - meeting colleagues that I interact on a daily basis in person!

We're on the hunt again for some good developers!

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:29:57 +0000

We’re on the hunt again for some good developers!

Ambitious plans need bold people - and this is a great chance to join VanMoof and help us shape a delightful experience for our customers.

Our bikes are smart, have a clean iconic design - and that’s how our website should be in the frontend and the backend!

Stack-wise we have mostly PHP and Javascript, deployed on the cloud. And you will have the chance to have an impact on every stage of the system and the process.