Ulrich Kautz Blog

My personal, technical blog about what I code and learn and do

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  • Why care about DevEx?

    April 2025

    Maximize software development impact with DevEx. Learn how improving developer education, competence, motivation, and environment drives faster delivery, higher quality, and more innovation.

  • The Expert Deadlock Dilemma

    June 2024

    Uncover the hidden pitfalls that lead to costly Expert Deadlocks in engineering teams and learn practical strategies to break free from the quagmire of indecision.

  • The Rubber Duck That Talked Back

    January 2024

    How Conversational AI Assistant Systems are revolutionizing knowledge worker professions around the globe by becoming actually useful for individuals.

  • Models, a story of human success

    October 2023

    Models are what enable us to tackle complexiy well beyond our capabitlies. This text is a celebration of that.

  • Scaling End-to-End Responsibility with Platforms

    May 2023

    The end-to-end responsibility model, and it’s smaller sibling YBIRYI, have revolutionized how IT operations are shaped. However, these models fail at scale due to the increased complexity of infrastructure. This leads to increased cognitive strain on individuals and overwhelms them… unless you utilize platform engineering to standardize and simplify the tech stack down to manageable size again. Read here here what that means and what metrics predict when platforms are required.

  • Platform Engineering: Development at Scale

    May 2023

    Platform Engineering is a trending topic. Good! Developer platforms are the native response to growing organizations that have tech at their heart. It is almost the only practice that allows software engineering at scale.

  • Interruptions: The Silent, High-Performance Killer

    March 2023

    Everybody these days wants high performers. Everybody wants to be a high performer. Everybody wants to hire high performers. High performance is commonly defined as: better, faster and more efficient than others. What this definition doesn’t tell you, of course, is how to do that. I can’t tell you that either, but I can tell you that high quality outcomes and high productivity share a common arch enemy: interruptions

  • The Cost of Interruptions

    March 2023

    Interruptions have a price tag. They impede both productivity and well-being. Just what exactly is the cost and how do you calculate it? Good questions! Read on here.

  • WireGuard VPN setup in Terraform CDK for Road Warriors

    December 2021

    Terraform CDK is the next generation of the multi-cloud provider Infrastructure-as-Code tooling from Hashicorp. It’s not fully mature, in my opinion, but on it’s way and already usable. This article explores the current state with the use-case of a “Road Warrior” VPN setup, that is based on WireGuard and that can be easily deployed into multiple clouds (and used with my Mac).

  • Finally A Personal Knowledge Management Tooling That Works

    November 2021

    I was interested in the topic of personal knowledge management since I first used a computer for learning. So far I could not find a solution that really worked well for me. Until now. I found my second brain. If you are a knowledge worker as well, are not gifted with a perfect memory and therefore need a tooling to help you manage the knowledge you learn - read on in the blog post.

  • Application Platform as Code

    June 2021

    An experiment with Infrastructure as Code and Application Platforms that investigates how both these things can work together, including a prototype library written in Typescript for AWS CDK.

  • On the Value of Platform Engineering

    March 2021

    My attempt to define what Platform Engineering means for me and what value it brings if employed.

  • My Static Website Blogging Stack on AWS

    March 2021

    I modularized my blogging stack in AWS that uses Hugo, S3, CloudFront, Route53 and ACM in an AWS CDK NPM package. This is a show-n-tell.

  • Why I like AWS CDK

    February 2021

    AWS CDK has been around for a while now and most of the main APIs reached stable. This is a look on the state of affairs from the perspective of a platform engineer.

  • Practical introduction to Go: Application development (3/3)

    July 2020

    Dive into Go application development. Understand advanced language concepts. Express an application design in Go. Learn to write tests.

  • Practical introduction to Go: Language basics (2/3)

    June 2020

    Understand the Go language basics. Get familiar with the Go ecosystem and standard library. Run and compile your first Go program.

  • Practical introduction to Go: Development environment (1/3)

    June 2020

    Setup local Go development environment

Projects

  • Getting started with Go