Brainfood Talks

The newly gained popularity of Internal Developer Platforms is obvious. And the well-intentioned attempt to reduce the cognitive load we've continuously built up on engineering teams seems too promising to avoid following. But what when the platform becomes what we wanted to avoid in the first place: a bedrock that can hardly be tamed, devouring the cognitive load of tons of engineers and ultimately doomed to fail?

Then, we most likely landed in the world of platform monoliths, an anti-pattern being on the rise. Leading to large blast radii, a lack of adaptability to evolution, and heavy losses in overall engineering effectiveness. In this talk, I will share strategies and methods to overcome the fallacies of building platform monoliths while creating a foundation that truly accelerates your engineering pace — leading to a rethinking of how platforms should be envisioned.

Many software engineers need to cope with painful affiliations with legacy systems. For the last 2.5 years, we have invested tremendous brainpower, time, and sweat into migrating and integrating an archaeological data model into a modern web platform. Today, we have managed to migrate the majority of the data and are able to use this data on our new web platform. We have learned a lot of lessons, and we think now would be the right time to share them with you.

With the latest changes to the language, C# moves toward a multi-paradigm language, enabling code to be written in an object-oriented and increasingly functional style. Besides the support of the language itself, railway-oriented programming is a concept from the active world that can also be leveraged in C#.

In our upcoming Brainfood Talk, David and Paul dive into the idea of railway-oriented programming and what it means to use this approach in big applications. They share some experience and discuss their love-hate relationship with this approach.

Every day, companies struggle to bring great software products to their customers with sufficient speed and efficiency. In this talk, we will share some insights on architecting successfully for both: organizational and technical scales. We dive into the balancing act between reuse and autonomy, the tradeoff between simplicity and technical excellence, and the key concepts that allow us to create the architectural foundation that stands the test of constant change.

Errors have a profound impact on user experience and shape the initial perception of your product. It is crucial to devote ample attention to how errors are caught, processed, and displayed. This responsibility extends beyond software engineers alone. Join us for an insightful talk where we explore the creation of an effective error strategy that sets developers up for success.