Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI are leading a revolution that will obsolete traditional SEO practices like content stuffing and link building. Let’s explore how these advancements transform SEO and what this means for your digital strategy.

Recent legal developments in Europe in the Cyber security field are set to impact businesses throughout Europe, particularly those involved in software development. With stricter regulations on the horizon, The NIS2 Directive is the EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity (The EU cybersecurity rules introduced in 2016 were updated by the NIS2 Directive).

Wat ging er mis? Microsoft bezit zowel LinkedIn als Azure. 🤷‍♂️

Alkmaar, november 2023 - ZEN Software, een pionier in innovatieve weboplossingen, kondigt met trots haar recente succes aan in samenwerking met Filogic. Filogic, een vooruitstrevend bedrijf en eigenaar van OpenTMS, een full-service transport management SaaS, heeft met succes de krachten gebundeld met ZEN Software om een opmerkelijke mijlpaal te bereiken.

Vandaag wil ik betogen dat Kunstmatige Intelligentie (AI) het ontbrekende stukje van de productiviteitspuzzel is, een revolutie teweegbrengt in de industrie en ons werk een nieuwe vorm geeft. Hoewel er bezorgdheid is geuit over het mogelijke risico van baanverplaatsing, is het essentieel om te erkennen dat de voordelen van Generatieve AI veel zwaarder wegen dan deze vrees.

Hackathons zijn uitgegroeid tot broedplaatsen voor baanbrekende ideeën en oplossingen. De recente Praxis/Brico Hackathon, gehouden op 28 en 29 september 2023, vormde hierop geen uitzondering. Dit evenement richtte zich op de convergentie van Google Cloud, Retail, E-commerce en ML/AI, en illustreerde het immense potentieel van deze technologieën wanneer ze gezamenlijk worden ingezet.

Twee weken nadat HashiCorp de licentievoorwaarden voor haar Terraform-software had gewijzigd, hebben gebruikers, waaronder concurrenten, een fork van de Terraform-code gemaakt. HashiCorp wijzigde de licentie van Mozilla Public License (MPL) naar Business Source License v1.1 (BSL).

In een felle confrontatie op sociale media heeft Mark Zuckerberg, CEO van Meta, een krachtige klap uitgedeeld aan 'Chief Twit' Elon Musk. De strijd begon met cijfers. Slechts vijf dagen na de lancering kondigde Zuckerberg trots aan dat Threads, in wezen een Twitter-kloon, al 100 miljoen gebruikers had.

In een schokkende onthulling heeft All-In-One Security (AIOS), een veelgebruikte WordPress-beveiligingsplugin geïnstalleerd op meer dan 1 miljoen websites, schokgolven gestuurd door de WordPress-gemeenschap. De plugin werd op heterdaad betrapt bij het loggen van plaintext wachtwoorden en het opslaan ervan in een toegankelijke database.

In de wereld van softwareontwikkeling vormen beveiligingslekken een voortdurende bedreiging. In juni 2014 werd een bedrijf het slachtoffer van een kwaadaardige cyberaanval die uiteindelijk tot de ondergang leidde. Dit waarschuwende verhaal herinnert ons eraan hoe belangrijk het is om gevoelige informatie te beschermen en benadrukt de noodzaak van Agile Analytics om dergelijke risico's te beperken.

Juli 2023 - Na twee jaar van onderzoek en verbeteringen zijn er geen bezwaren meer tegen het gebruik van Google Workspace-diensten voor Nederlandse scholen en universiteiten. In 2021 hadden toezichthouders hun zorgen geuit over de bescherming van gegevens, met name met betrekking tot de opslag buiten Europa.

Het opzetten en beheren van een Kubernetes-cluster wordt steeds complexer. Een website draaien met slechts een handvol Docker-containers zou echter niet moeilijk moeten zijn om op te zetten en te beheren.

WordPress biedt bedrijven, creatieve enthousiastelingen en contentmakers uitgebreide mogelijkheden met zijn gebruiksvriendelijke interface en uitgebreide aanpassingsmogelijkheden. Desondanks kan het handmatig labelen van afbeeldingen een bron van frustratie zijn bij het werken met WordPress. Gelukkig maakt de baanbrekende plugin van ZEN Software een einde aan deze vervelende taak.

Innovaties zoals ChatGPT en AI hebben een transformatie ingezet in verschillende industrieën, waardoor de productiviteit wordt verhoogd en de aard van ons werk opnieuw wordt vormgegeven. Toch ervaren sommige werkgevers weerstand tegen deze verandering, zoals te zien is in de recente overweging om het gebruik van ChatGPT op bepaalde werkplekken te verbieden.

Softwarekwaliteit gaat verder dan functionaliteit. Niet-functionele aspecten zoals prestaties, betrouwbaarheid en veiligheid zijn cruciaal. Ons Agile Analytics SaaS-platform biedt een uitgebreide oplossing om deze dimensies effectief te beheren en te meten. Door gebruik te maken van DORA-metrics en SRE Error Budgets kunnen teams de inzet, betrouwbaarheid en beveiliging optimaliseren, terwijl ook de softwarevoorraad wordt bewaakt en gelekte privésleutels worden opgespoord.

De term "yak shaving" in de programmering komt uit een aflevering van de populaire tekenfilm "Ren & Stimpy" uit de jaren 90. In deze aflevering vraagt Ren aan Stimpy om een yak te scheren. De aflevering met de titel "Stimpy's uitvinding" bevat een scène waarin Ren aan Stimpy vraagt om een yak te scheren, maar om dat te kunnen doen heeft Stimpy een speciaal scheermes nodig, dat een speciaal mes vereist, dat geslepen moet worden met een speciale steen, enzovoort.

Mijn reden om in de software-industrie te werken is altijd games geweest; van jongs af aan speelde ik games op mijn XT-PC, Gameboy, 386 DX, Pentium (Cyrix), Voodoo 3d kaart en later consoles (Playstation). Ik droomde ervan om in een gamestudio of in Silicon Valley te werken.

De Europese Unie (EU) heeft een belangrijke regelgeving voor cryptocurrency's goedgekeurd die cryptobeurzen verantwoordelijk houdt voor verliezen van klanten. De regels, die in 2024 van kracht worden in de 27 EU-lidstaten, zijn bedoeld om investeerders te beschermen en het witwassen van geld en de financiering van terrorisme te voorkomen.

In 2006 introduceerde Werner Vogels, de CTO van Amazon, de inmiddels beroemde mantra "You build it, you run it", die sindsdien een leidend principe is geworden voor veel organisaties. Deze filosofie moedigt teams aan om eigenaar te worden van de producten die ze ontwikkelen en bevordert een gevoel van autonomie en verantwoordelijkheid.

Softwareontwikkelaars vinden de ontwikkeling van nieuwe functies vaak het leukste aspect van hun werk. Ze kunnen er hun creativiteit in kwijt, interessante problemen oplossen en tastbare resultaten afleveren. Bovendien is de primaire focus van de producteigenaar van het team meestal gericht op het toevoegen van nieuwe functies aan het product, omdat ze geloven dat dit is wat klanten willen en wat inkomsten zal genereren.

Kwaliteitspoorten dienen als controlepunten of mijlpalen binnen de levenscyclus van softwareontwikkeling om ervoor te zorgen dat aan specifieke kwaliteitscriteria wordt voldaan voordat wordt doorgegaan naar de volgende fase. Maar al te vaak zien we dat, terwijl het proces wordt geïmplementeerd, de gegevens die op tafel worden 'gebracht' niet empirisch zijn. We zien veel HiPPO-gedrag (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) tijdens deze vergaderingen. Wij denken dat we daar een oplossing voor hebben!

Een uitgelekt document van een anonieme Googlemedewerker heeft discussies aangewakkerd over de impact van open-source AI-projecten op industriereuzen als Google en OpenAI. Hoewel het document een enkele mening binnen Google vertegenwoordigt en mogelijk geen invloed heeft op de bedrijfsstrategie van het bedrijf, geeft het inzicht in de interne discussies rondom open-source AI.

Naarmate softwareontwikkeling complexer wordt, groeit ook de behoefte aan testen. Testen is een integraal onderdeel van de levenscyclus van softwareontwikkeling en is essentieel om de betrouwbaarheid, functionaliteit en kwaliteit van de ontwikkelde software te garanderen. Er zijn verschillende soorten testen die software ontwikkelaars gebruiken, maar twee van de meest voorkomende zijn unit testen en integratie testen.

Een post-mortem is een retrospectieve analyse van een incident of storing in een softwaresysteem. Een post-mortem heeft als doel de hoofdoorzaak van het probleem te identificeren, de reactie op het incident te evalueren en een plan te ontwikkelen om soortgelijke incidenten in de toekomst te voorkomen door het softwaresysteem of de processen te verbeteren.

Het strangler pattern is een techniek uit Dave Farley's 'Continuous Delivery' voor het transformeren van een monolithisch softwaresysteem naar een op microservices gebaseerde architectuur. Het houdt in dat delen van een groot monolithisch softwaresysteem geleidelijk worden vervangen door kleinere microservices, waardoor de monoliet in de loop van de tijd wordt "gewurgd" totdat deze volledig is vervangen. De naam 'strangler pattern' is afgeleid van de wurgliaan die op een andere boom groeit en deze als fysieke steun gebruikt, terwijl hij ook zonlicht en voedingsstoffen van de boom steelt, wat uiteindelijk de gastheerplant doodt.

Ik was een stuk code aan het debuggen dat een Java.lang.OutOfMemoryError veroorzaakte. Na een kort onderzoek ontdekte ik dat de SQL-query die de code uitvoerde geen 'WHERE'-clausule bevatte, waardoor een grote tabel bijna volledig gedownload werd, waardoor het proces geen geheugen meer had.

Software development can be tough. With tight deadlines, many lines of code to write, and countless bugs to fix, it can feel like a never-ending uphill battle. But thankfully, ChatGPT is coming to the rescue to level up your team’s performance. Luckily ChatGPT is a much better coder than a poet.

Since the launch of chatGPT, it’s been DEFCON 1 at Google HQ. ChatGPT could easily lead to a golden-egg-laying-goose killer for Google: Google’s Search Ads business. Basically, Google has been printing money since their invention of Google Search Ads, and their top-dog position has been unchallenged for ever so long; this may all change now.

ZEN Software Tech Consultancy was cruciaal bij de implementatie van de Cloud Transformatie van de Rabobank. Als vertrouwde partner werkte ZEN nauw samen met de Security Architecture Board van de Rabobank om de beveiliging van de Public Cloud continu te verbeteren en te beschermen. Samen hebben we de Cloud Transformation Strategy van de Rabobank opgesteld, met een sterke nadruk op het beleid om prioriteit te geven aan SaaS boven PaaS boven IaaS.

Agile doesn't work...

I hear it more and more. When I use root cause analysis to find out what the problem is, it's usually due to a combination of:

1. An Agile implementation that's not very agile.
2. No metrics in place to measure success or improvements.

With the rise of remote work, remote coding job interviews have become increasingly popular. However, this shift has brought new challenges. Particularly concerning are the new possibilities for cheating and fakery during the interview process.

Error budgets are an essential tool for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) that allow organisations to balance reliability and innovation. In this post, we will discuss how to introduce the practice of Error Budgets in your organisation and make the necessary changes to support it.

In recent years, the security of WordPress has come under scrutiny due to several high-profile vulnerabilities and attacks. In a recent attack, at least 30 WordPress plugins were infected, causing more than 1000 sites to be vulnerable. These security flaws have caused many businesses and organizations to consider migrating away from WordPress and towards more scalable and secure solutions like ReactJS hosted on Google Cloud.

De overheid mag voor zijn clouddiensten eindelijk in zee gaan met buitenlandse techreuzen zo valt te lezen een brief die onlangs aan de Tweede Kamer is gestuurd door Staatssecretaris Alexandra van Huffelen (Digitalisering). Nu was het niet zo dat alles wat cloud is categorisch verboden was, onze overheid gebruikt voor een deel al Cloud-diensten zoals Microsofts Office 365. Dit is een Cloud SaaS-dienst. Maar voor meer interne en gevoelige data waren de Cloud PaaS en IaaS diensten van Microsoft, Google en Amazon uitgesloten.

With Big Tech becoming just a bit less Big these weeks: Facebook firing 10k employees, Twitter halving its workforce on Twitter HQ and Google is likely to follow.

The question of the moment is: “how do you determine engineers to let go?”. At Twitter HQ, the answer appears to have been lines of code. 😳

Thoughtworks is a publicly owned, global technology company with 49 offices in 18 countries and around 10.000 employees. It provides software tools and consulting services. The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a document that sets out the changes that the company thinks are currently interesting in software development.

When a software project has to be quickly completed and delivered, despite the code not being perfect, your team is assuming technical debt to meet the deadline. In their haste to deliver software capabilities, developers sometimes engage in less-than-optimal coding practices, or ‘forget’ to test or document parts of the software.

If you have any internal development tools, platforms or services in your organisation that you found super easy and pain-free to onboard, then you are lucky! Put yourselves in your users' shoes.

When teams are not co-located engagement and performance issues can easily spin out of control. DORA metrics are critical when working in a hybrid or fully remote work model. Whether you’re ready to move past the hybrid midpoint or are taking the direct leap to remote, here’s why you need DORA metrics at your side.

ZEN Software proudly announces that we are accepted as Atlassian Partner for our flagship product. Agile Analytics is a time-saving analytics platform for Development Managers, Agile Coaches and Project Managers.

Agile Analytics is a comprehensive data analytics and reporting tool based on the data from Atlassian Jira Cloud.

Know everything about your projects:

• Use Agile Analytics to see how each team is spending their time.
• Know the status of all your tasks.
• Understand which skills you need to hire or train.

The “air-cooled” Azure data centre in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands (Azure region “West Europe”) absorbed a whopping 84 million litres of drinking water last year. That is much more than Microsoft’s stated consumption of 12 to 20 million litres in June last year.

How do you know what performance of your software development organisation is? How do you prevent your engineers from getting frustrated, leaving, overworked or burnt out while at the same time get fair metrics on the performance of the team(s)?

The founder and driving force behind Uber is Travis Kalanick. Travis never outgrew the frat-boy phase but starts a company nonetheless. He ensures to be at the helm whatever happens. This fear is a legacy from the company before Uber, where he was successfully screwed over and ousted by a Hollywood investor.

When releasing Agile Analytics we struggled linking Google Ads to Google Analytics v4 to our fine ReactJS site. Here is a small step-by-step guide on how to achieve this:

1. Connect your Google Ads to your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) account
2. Connect your Google Ads account to your website
3. Add and set up Google Ads conversions

In our examples we will connect Google Ads to our Next.js website in vanilla way (without any additional plugins). Please note that we have GA4 account already connected.

WordPress has been our Content Management System (CMS) since forever at ZEN Software. Why would we ever change a winning combination? We started to reconsider our position on WordPress after the founding and discontinuation of WaveScale in 2021.

An estimated 400 Atlassian customers have had access cut for up to a week in an ongoing problem the company has blamed on a maintenance script.

The incident first occurred around April 5, with the company acknowledging the problem on Twitter two days later.

Several cloud services have now been down for a week for those customers, meaning they’ve lost access to Jira Software, Jira Work Management, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Opsgenie Cloud, Statuspage, and Atlassian Access.

Introduction

Error Budgets enable a large amount of autonomy for your software teams. these feature teams can steer priority based on the level of service that is currently being offered to stakeholders. This article will explain the basics of the concepts that enable Error Budgets. Furthermore it will demonstrate how to implement it using ZEN Software’s Agile Analytics.

When implementing Error Budgets for your teams a number of things needs to be setup up in both the team culture as well as in the tools.

Is there a difference?

While it looks like the terms are identical, at ZEN Software we make a distinction between the two terms. Googling for ‘Cloud Native’ returns the same result as for ‘Native Cloud’. Let’s just imagine that Google cares more about keywords than keyword order. Even so: there is a difference when using the words in a specific order.

Let’s see

Why Docker?

At ZEN Software we see docker as a Configuration Management innovation. Docker solves a number of frustrating developer problems. Docker improves both the productivity and reliability of a software system.

Docker does this by:

1. Removing all the dependency nightmares that cause production environments to be different from development environments.
2. Increasing the efficiency of packaging and deployment (both in terms of size and time)
3. Improves developer productivity — especially the inner loop of Edit -> Build -> Debug

All excellent goals to achieve, and largely accomplished.

After 30 months of coding, designing, debating and bugfixing we’re proud and happy to announce we are releasing Agile Analytics to the general public!

Agile Analytics is now GA Why should your organisation use Agile Analytics?

For Development Managers

• Match or challenge gut feeling with real data
• Reward collaborative behaviour
• Manage Developer Experience (DX)

For Teams & Agile Coaches

• Improve autonomy: Make decisions for yourselves
• OKR / SLA : promise vs reality
• Actionable & real-time performance data: ‘how are we really doing?’

Een kopieerconstructor is een speciaal type constructor in objectgeoriënteerde talen zoals C++ en Java dat een nieuw object maakt door het te initialiseren met een bestaand object. De kopieerconstructor wordt gebruikt om een kopie van een object te maken op een manier die onafhankelijk is van het originele object, wat betekent dat wijzigingen aan de kopie geen invloed hebben op het origineel.

Als je vergeet om een kopie constructor te implementeren en de standaard constructor van de programmeertaal gebruikt, zal de kopie constructor een ondiepe kopie uitvoeren.

Meet ‘Gilfoyle’; Gilfoyle lives inside HBO’s comedy series ‘Silicon Valley’. This series portrays a number of fictional silicon valley companies and mainly: Pied Piper. Pied Piper is the startup company where the main characters of the show (Richard, Gilfoyle, Dinesh and Jared) strive for world dominance with their new products.

Gilfoyle and Dinesh are developers. The way they are portrayed in the series is spot on if you consider the 3 virtues of a programmer:

• Laziness,
• Impatience,
• Hubris

For Google Recertification assignment nr 1 is to scan your workplace to see if there are any hidden devices that could influence the exam.

All was fine and the exam was a PASS! I’ll be a certified Solution Architect for another 2 years.

'Decommissioning legacy systems is an art'. a wise architect once told me. He was right.

We’re happy and proud that the #Maxeda Team (in the picture) finished what we started 'back in the day'. We planned to remove the legacy system 1 year go-live of the new platform but it did not take 'only 1 year' like I predicted.. much longer indeed 😇

• Choose AWS Cloud Watch
• Configure the details and press ‘test’
• Then under ‘SRE & Error Budget’ you can add a feature to a service and configure the cloud watch metrics copied from the Cloud Watch Console

In October 2021 the whole team of Agile Analytics descended upon Alkmaar to.

There was cake, workshops and demos.

For hosting the ZEN Gathering in Alkmaar, Zoia & Dasha presented me with a classic Cossack shirt.

Дуже дякую!

Move 7 meters, get 20 square meters more office space.

With Dreamlab moving offices to Pieter Zeemanstraat 13A in Alkmaar. Their offices were available to us. so we moved shop from Oosterweezenstraat 6G to Oosterweezenstraat 6E, a whole 7 meters.

We gained 20 square meters so are now able to comfortably provide 5 desks and a bigger corner for demo and standups

Agile Analytics allows you to integrate Jira project management to determine what of the completed (or created) tasks qualify as

• feature
• non-feature

ZEN Software created a machine learning classification algorithm to teach Agile Analytics what is a ‘feature’ and what not. To help improve the accuracy you as user of Agile Analytics can train the model for your organisation.

This great new innovation allows Development Manager and Agile Coaches everywhere to see how the pace of feature dev is!

Lucky for us I managed to get a paint cover in under 5 minutes from the shops across the street before ‘the pouring' 🙂 preventing worse….

The construction upstairs reached the concrete stage…. glad it is over now and the rain stopped.

Perhaps you’ve now implemented some of the DevOps principles and processes. The next step is to make it work at scale by implementing SRE. Here are some methods that have proven effective in getting teams off the ground with SRE principles:

In September 2020 Bulent Yokus, Wout Smelt and Arjan Franzen started talks to disrupt the VPS-dominated hosting market by leveraging Cloud infrastructure. This way we should be able to provide a highly scalable alternative to server-oriented based e-commerce hosting.

We founded WaveScale and set out to develop the WaveScale platform and start the WaveScale Portal. We recruited the team in the winter of 2020/21 and onboarded the first customer on the platform in mid-2021. The portal development had trouble getting off the ground and we struggled to get the base load standardised.

Both DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) promise to improve integration between Development and Operations (DevOps) and resiliency in organisations. However, many in our field remain unfamiliar with DevOps and SRE concepts, making it difficult to implement these methods, hire or train for DevOps and SRE roles.

SRE and DevOps are very complementary practices. When implementing both, they accelerate the movement toward continuous delivery.

With the first wave of COVID-19 behind us and offices still not completely available we decided to meet in person, at 1,5 mtr distance for a strategy workshop with OKR as theme.

The session was very engaging, we set new goals and plotted a course for the months to come.

In 1984 Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox innovated the world of business books by writing an implementation guide to Lean as a novel. Previously this had not been done successfully. Since the success of ‘The Goal’ there have been 2 successful attempts to recreate Business Novels for IT and Software Development. Gene Kim wrote ‘The Phoenix Project’ in 2013 and the companion book ‘The Unicorn Project’ in 2019 as a hommage to ‘The Goal’ and as a way to use business fiction to implement DevOps. These books try to be a novel/story and “best practices” business book while also showing some key issues and problems with large corporations.

Aansturen van Agile Transformatie bij CrunchraZEN Software Tech Consultancy heeft een impact gehad op Crunchr, een scale-up met 20 ingenieurs die een HR-technologieoplossing ontwikkelen. Met de begeleiding van ZEN's Agile Coach heeft Crunchr zijn softwareontwikkelingsaanpak getransformeerd, wat resulteerde in verbeterde efficiëntie, samenwerking en motivatie.

On 7 November 2019 the Maxeda DIY Digital management (NL/BE) team set off to Brussels because Erik Cuypers was nominated CDO of the year 2019 in Belgium. We were confident he’d win the prize and were not disappointed. Erik won the award for CDO of the Year 2019! Since this is Belgium, there are 2 awards for CDO of the year:

• Dutch speaking CDO of the year and
• French speaking CDO of the year.

Erik won the Dutch speaking CDO of the year award. 🥳 well deserved Erik!

As part of the Data Science trajectory at Young Mavericks, ZEN Software provided an introduction to Multi-Cloud. How can you use cloud in Data Science and what choices are there in the field of Cloud as a toolset.

Back in 2014 i bought a Huawei B593s-22 which would allow me to be able to work non office locations using WiFi.

So using the router for a while all was fine and I had the option, when I ran out of my ‘daily allowance' of 5GB to add extra allowance with the push of a button inside the telco’s app. How happy everything was!

Then, for boring reasons: I switched to a provider with much better reception ✔️ however I lost the ability to push a button for extra GBs ❌

I arrogantly thought to simply put on my coding gloves and fix a little script in 1 evening to send out a SMS (cute!) for my extra allowance.

Our Maxeda team decided that we needed to improve our Application Performance Monitoring. We needed to develop the capability for distributed tracing and ended up having found SignalFX to be up for the job. Part of the introduction was a number of trainings to get the department familiar and all links to systems setup.

The Maxeda Digital team set out to experience ‘Epicenter’ in Kyiv. This massive DIY retailer was a good study object for our trip. In addition to the study-trip we made good progress on architectural improvements for frontend distribution and microservices implementation.

Arjan was invited to speak at Launch Darkly’s trajectory conference. Reason for the invitation was the match between Launch Darkly’s feature management platform and the introduction of A/B Tests and Feature Management at Maxeda in 2018.

Arjan detailed how the team got to the conclusion that Launch Darkly and Feature Management were needed and how it will be an important tool for the future to work like Lean Startup. Based on proving hypothesis and not gut feeling.

ZEN Software and Mirabeau teamed to facilitate a trip to San Francisco. We visited Google Cloud Next, negotiated with a number of (prospect) suppliers and Arjan gave a talk about Feature flags and Cloud implementation at Launch Darkly.

The team headed to the Moscone Center and visited a large number of talks on varying topics like:

• Knative
• (Management of) Service Mesh
• How AI is transforming the Enterprise
• Kelsey Hightower on Container panel

After a number of years working from a home office, 2019 is the year ZEN Software will have its own place. We are located just outside of the historic city centre of Alkmaar, The Netherlands.

As Hyperscale clouds are concerned: Google is a top-tier cloud provider. With its launch in 2011, thus the newest player in the market, GCP has quickly secured a stable market position with a unique offering in Big Data and AI services.

To start the Year 2019 off well, a team from the Amsterdam office flew to Kyiv to start the year. Celebrate past successes and plan for the coming year. Ukraine in winter is great, we were not disappointed with -12c.

Challenges for 2019 were to be as successful as 2018 when the team delivered a new e-commerce platform and finished the majority of the cloud transformation.

New Relic hosted an event in Amsterdam and I was happy to provide their customers about the use of New Relic and how to integrate their Application Performance Management tools into a large e-commerce platform.

New Relic provides key insights into both performance and stability of the platform, both microservices and the monolith backend.

At ZEN Software we’re able to help your organisation implement Application Performance Monitoring and provide your teams valuable insights into the software the teams are building and deploying

This July the teams in Brussels, Kyiv, Odessa and Amsterdam completed the main stage of the Cloud Transformation and we are ready for LAUNCH! 🚀

For technical and design workshops we set off to Odessa. We had a successful collaboration and solved a number of interesting digital puzzles. In good spirits we set off to have dinner outside in Odessa’s beautiful historic city center.

Some of the Amsterdam gang went for a run and sightseeing at once.

After the workshops were finished the team enjoyed the nightlife in Odessa, Club Ibiza.

When New Relic hosted an event, I was happy to share with their customers what we were up to at Maxeda. Our Cloud Transformation is in progress and our first phase of architecture design is complete.

After the talk the team went for a drink in the Okura bar. This was the exact moment that the platform started to bork. Luckily we were able to use New Relic and the present cloud team to debug the site and get it up and running in no time flat.

Version control was and perhaps always will be a subject of debate. It seems at times we are in a search for a singular "best' way to manage versions of code under all circumstances. Since about 2008 git has increased popularity significantly and is the most popular version control system since 2012. This meant a new round of debate on how to use the most popular version control system at the time: git. Since it is 2017 now, has the dust settled, and are there any conclusions?

We joined a nice group of people in De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam to talk about how LeSS, Large Scale Scrum can help organisation scale their team based processes.

Large Scale Scrum is heavily influenced by Lean and can make what works great for teams work great for entire organisations. There are some challenges when implementing LeSS, mainly around knowledge and coordination of implementation of LeSS.

The discussions were interesting, definitely something we’ll be researching more the coming months!

Update 2017-05: Being certified LeSS practitioners, ZEN Software can help your organisation scale Agile too! Lear now? let’s get in touch!

Happy to kick start the software development teams at TextKernel with an introduction training Scrum. The training was interactive and we practiced a number of sprints, how to collaborate and estimate

Want to know more how your organisation can benefit from using Scrum or Agile? Contact us at ZEN Software and we’ll kick start your organisation too!

“Obeya” or ‘big room’ is what we used at Maxeda to jump start our Cloud Transformation and implementation of new cloud based e-commerce platform. The visuals, new design and flow of the new platform generated a number of very useful and interactive sessions with all digital stakeholders.

For the Maxeda Cloud Transformation and new e-commerce platform we scaled up our Software operation and setup new teams of experts at HYS Enterprise in Odessa.

This means introducing the teams into the ways of Maxeda, the systems and the plans for the near future. In 1 week we gave a number trainings and started to co-develop software straight away.

Bank Mendes Gans (BMG) onderkende de noodzaak om moderne softwareontwikkelpraktijken te omarmen om de concurrentie voor te blijven. ZEN Software Tech Consultancy kwam binnen: hun expertise op het gebied van DevOps en Continuous Delivery speelde een cruciale rol bij het moderniseren van de softwareontwikkelingsprocessen van BMG.

Most organisations that develop software use some form of Agile Software Development. Spotify became famous for its own model: The Spotify model. This model is organised around teams called ‘squads’. While this organisational model is fairly well known, what’s less known is the office planning of the Spotify model. Just like the responsibilities and autonomy center around the team (squad), so do the facilities inside the office. each squad space has:

• 7 +/- 2 desks
• Meeting room
• Standup meeting facilities
• Relax/meet area

At Bank Mendes Gans, our System Team introduced Containers to the large and international team of developers. We tried to help our introduction to containers by explaining a very Dutch phenomenon: Summer Holiday Caravanning (to France) and bringing all food and supplies with you for the holiday. You could basically survive on the camp site, never needing to go to a local supermarket. With only a bit of electricity and a lavatory close by for 3 weeks. Growing up in a middle class family in The Netherlands this way of ‘celebrating holidays' was very well known to most Dutchies in the room.

As of today, the ZEN Software legal entity exists. As a one-man-army, I’ll be doing consultancy for all organisations wanting to improve their software development. “Purposeful Software Delivery” as motto for ZEN Software.

Inspired by Dan Pink’s TED talk about motivation and team work we set off to implement ‘Ship it/Fed ex days’ like Atlassian did.

Our version is called ‘Improvement Days’ and has the same goal, but different rules. All engineers and non-engineers were invited to join the improvement days.

Security awareness is very important when safeguarding the data of your customers. To improve the security awareness and have some fun at the same time we decided to hold a recurring training for all engineers and combine this with a shared hacking session.

Learn how to secure your software, learn how to program with security in mind and:

Last Year (2011) CyberTech was acquired by NICE Systems. So this year we started up the collaboration between the Development Office in Alkmaar, The Netherlands and Corporate HQ in Ra'anana, Israel.

I was part of a 4 person delegation from the Alkmaar office tasked to find out how to best work together and do a ‘show and tell’ about the Alkmaar products, architecture and processes.

We left Amsterdam late in the evening and landed in Tel Aviv early in the night. After waiting patiently for the security checks to be done, the four of us crammed ourselves in a small taxi near the airport.

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and Git, talks about version controlling the Linux kernel. He harps about the benefits of fully distributed version control with Git in particular. Torvalds has written Git himself after he received a fair bit of criticism for using the commercial BitKeeper (The Horror! 😉 ) to manage the Linux Kernel project for some time. At this moment there are very few version control systems that can operate fully distributed: CVS and SVN are specifically NOT suited for this task.