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Parking at Munich Airport: An Awful Experience

The parking experience at Munich Airport is awful. It is too easy to do something wrong, which can only be remedied by calling support. The bad user experience is caused by a bad system architecture. The pieces for a better architecture are already in place. Improving the interaction between these pieces improves the architecture and a fortiori the user experience. I can at least dream of a better parking experience in the future, although I can’t change the current one.

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Book Review: “Accelerate” by Nicole Forsgren et al.

The book Accelerate – Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren et al. is an eye opener and game changer for everyone involved in software development. Nicole provides empirical evidence why teams that apply best practices like test and deployment automation, continuous integration, loosely coupled architectures and team empowerment by far outperform teams that don’t. Following the practices of the Agile Manifesto, eXtreme Programming and Scrum enables teams to deliver software both faster and with higher quality than teams ignoring these practices. Trade-offs between speed and quality are debunked as lame excuses.

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FOSS Qt Releases Delayed by up to 12 Months?

On 8 April 2020, Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote in an email to the KDE community (emphasis mine):

[…] last week, [The Qt Company] suddenly informed both the KDE e.V. board and the KDE Free QT Foundation that the economic outlook caused by the Corona virus puts more pressure on them to increase short-term revenue. As a result, they are thinking about restricting ALL Qt releases to paid license holders for the first 12 months.

To be clear: Nothing has been decided yet. I certainly hope that this “thinking” by The Qt Company remains just that: thinking. But I am not quite sure.

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Less Love for FOSS Qt Users

From Qt 5.15, The Qt Company make their offering a bit more inconvenient for FOSS users. They announced three changes:

  • A Qt account is mandatory to download binary Qt packages. The offline installer is not available to FOSS users any more.
  • LTS (long-term support) releases are not available to FOSS users, once the next minor or major release is out.
  • Small business pay 499 USD per year, if their yearly revenue is less than 100,000 USD and they have less than five employees.

What do these changes mean for the development of Qt embedded Linux systems under LGPLv3?

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Lessons from Six Years as a Solo Consultant

The beginning of this month marked my sixth anniversary of becoming a solo consultant. I don’t regret my decision and cannot imagine ever giving up solo consulting. I was essential in the implementation of some really interesting projects like infotainment systems for cars and driver terminals for sugar beet and forage harvesters. The income from these projects gives me the financial freedom to enjoy life more than ever before.

I took my anniversary as the cause for reflecting about what I should have done differently. I learned three main lessons.

  • Hourly billing runs against the best interest of your customers. As a solo consultant, you have no interest in becoming more productive. The longer hours you work the higher your income. You can only change this, if you Don’t Bill by the Hour but charge a value-based fee.
  • Charging customers for the value you provide becomes much simpler if you have a strong brand. A strong brand will Make Potential Customers Call You. You don’t have to search for projects any more, but projects will find you.
  • Productised Services are part product and part service. The product part is the same for all customers, whereas the service part is specific to each customer. You maximise your profit by minimising the time you spend on the service part.

I will heed the conclusions drawn from these lessons and implement them step by step. How about you?

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Book Review: “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

My favourite business book of 2018 is It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. The reason why people work crazy hours is not that there is

[…] more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there’s hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it. People are working more but getting less done. It doesn’t add up – until you account for the majority of time being wasted on things that don’t matter.

The authors call out working crazy hours for not being “a badge of honor” but “a mark of stupidity”. Yes, it’s good to hear this from people who know what they are talking about. Jason is the CEO and David the CTO of Basecamp, which they have been running very successfully since 2003. They describe in the book how – at Basecamp – they replaced crazy at work with calm at work.

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Seminar “Open-Source Management in Software Supply Chains”

On 20 November 2018, the law firm Bird & Bird hosted a seminar about “Open-Source Management in Software Supply Chains – Effective and Consistent License Compliance” in their Frankfurt office. The seminar was organised by Miriam Ballhausen, who is Bird & Bird’s specialist in open-source Licensing.

The seminar offered the opportunity to meet two of Germany’s top lawyers for FOSS license compliance: Miriam Ballhausen and Catharina Maracke. If you have any questions about how to comply with FOSS licenses, Miriam and Catharina will give you invaluable counsel.

The roughly 25 attendees hailed from very different industries: automotive, agricultural, financial, medical, manufacturing and IT services. In late 2018, you cannot escape FOSS: Free open-source software has arrived in the mainstream.

Now, let me give you a summary of the four talks.
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