The world wins with happy developers

I just spent the last couple of days at the We Are Developers World Conference in Berlin with my team. Not surprisingly agentic AI was a big topic especially how the software development life cycle is being redefined along with the job of software development itself, what is worth measuring and what is not, and how different companies are tackling similar challenges.

My aim in this conference was not to gather technical details, but rather to look for inspiration to become a better manager, therefore several of the talks I decided to attend were about creating high performance teams, removing friction and improving developer experience. Time well spent.

Plus there is the possibility to watch all other talks online. In that sense, zero FOMO during the conference knowing everything will be available. Kudos to the organisers.

First published in LinkedIn

Capture The Flag (CTF)

Last month I participated in a CTF event organised by the RR team in Indy through this platform, CyLab Security Academy. The challenges covered several categories and were organised in 6 levels, each level only made available if you solve at least 50% of the challenges in the previous level. While some challenges I could solve in a few minutes, others took much much longer. In fact I got stuck for days in a reverse engineering one. I ended up learning a fair bit about assembly and radare2 through The Official Radare2 Book and eventually cracked the challenge. However I ran out of time and could only complete one more challenge before the deadline. All in all, great experience. I decided to go solo instead of teaming up with someone else and managed to finish in the top 10th percentile of participants (~13th percentile of people who at least solved one challenge). Nothing like jumping into a new topic to see how many things you don't know...

S25 Half Marathon 2026

This was posted on LinkedIn on 20th April

A year ago I would have thought this was impossible, and yet it happened yesterday. I finished my first race, a half marathon!

The real challenge has been keeping the discipline to show up for the training sessions on my own over the long cold winter, even if it meant running while snowing in the evenings or along frozen tracks in Grunewald. In retrospect, signing up for another race later in Spring or in early Summer would have been much better. Lesson learned for next time.

Kudos to my brother for coming all the way from Madrid to run along with me. Without him it would have been even harder. With him it was still hard but also fun, and this will become a core memory. Even more so as arriving at the Olympic Stadium through the marathon gate was truly magical.