• What I am Missing in Most GenAI Conversations

    When people talk about Generative AI, the focus is usually on:

    • Prompting
    • LLMs
    • Chatbots
    • Proofs of Concept (POCs)

    But what I am missing a lot in those conversations are:

    1. Try classic automation first
    2. Process integration: Can I add it into a process so that it fixes a problem?
    3. Data privacy
    4. Security
    5. Works council/employee representation (if applicable)
    6. Observability (not just the usual observability but also prompts and responses)
    7. Robust data pipelines (a.k.a ETL)
    8. Model Selection
    9. Model decay & re-evaluation (How often will you need to update? Currently about ~1x / year)
    10. Regulatory Compliance AI Act (EU)
    11. Costs (Tokens, maintenance, scaling — over years, not demo days)
    12. Scalability
    13. Latency & Performance:
    14. Testing (“it works in demo” ≠ “it works in production with real users”)
    15. Human-in-the-Loop (HITL):
    16. The other 95% of the app (The “boring” software stack around the AI)
    17. APIs (If it’s meant to automate, it needs to talk to other systems)

    If there’s a user interface:

    • Interface design & UX (no one uses what they can’t understand)

    And the elephant in the room:

    • How do you address the fear—justified or not—that you might be innovating people out of their jobs?

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  • The Architect I Never Knew I Was

    For years, whenever someone asked me what I do, I described my projects and activities, like “I worked on a cloud migration, reduced technical debt, refactored systems to be cloud-native, designed environments for scalability, cost effectiveness and security, …”. But I could never express in a TL;DR what I really did. My official title “Senior Process Manager” wasn’t very helpfull as well.

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  • Why Your Favorite AI Tool Might Be Isolating You

    AI chat tools are a remarkable invention. Their rapid adoption speaks for itself: instant access to information, tailored feedback, and the ability to explore ideas or discuss one own thoughts or questions without friction – never before did we have such opportunities. But this power can come with a risk.

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  • Don’t promote your most talented technologists into people management

    I just attended an event where Casey West also demoed some stuff. Just now I found his blog at https://caseywest.com as well. And scrolling through, I saw his post A Call for More Tech Leadership from 2015 where he writes:

    Don’t promote your most talented technologists into people management. Promote them into technical leadership roles instead.

    Casey West

    Well it’s 10 years later and still just true!

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  • How to guide your teams to use GenAI effectively while avoiding the pitfalls

    We often see and hear a lot of hype and – unfortunately – enshittification when it comes to GenAI. Despite knowing that there are indeed some valuable use cases for the application of AI to solve some issues, I rarely read about a employee friendly adoption of GenAI.

    The article AI for Network Managers: Leading Teams in the Age of Intelligent Automation was a quite refreshing read in that regard!

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  • A Vacuum Robot should not Require a permanent Internet Connection

    Today morning I read a really nice article / blog post “The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me“. The whole story is about a guy who disallowed his smart vacuum cleaner to access the internet. After a while it failed, got repaired, failed again, got repaired and after all stopped working.

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  • How to fix: Windows automatically goes to Dark Mode (after Oct 16th 2025)

    Problem: Windows automatically goes to dark or light mode, no matter what is set in the system settings. Even worse: when you change the mode in the system settings, windows switches back after a few seconds.

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  • Github Copilot is the Coach I always Wanted

    We hear a lot about the bad side of AI Code Generation etc. But there are also quite some good sides that should not be ignored.

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  • How to get RSS feeds for Releases / Tags on GitHub

    With growing amount of running selfhosted services, it becomes a bit tedious to keep track of new software releases.

    Luckily, GitHub offers RSS Streams for Releases and Tags (and some more). By adding those streams to the RSS reader, I see it in my RSS feeds when I have to take action.

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  • Open Source Resilience: Forks and Kindness

    For a while now, I’ve been considering running my own RSS aggregator … for a couple of reasons (that don’t matter here). In my shortlist were two popular candidates: Tiny Tiny RSS (ttrss) and FreshRSS. Due to lack of time and other priorites, I had not made a decision, which one to follow ..

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